opposable » a posable

Chiefly in:   a posable thumb

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Treecats have 3 fingers and a poseable thumb and a massive obsession for celery as far as I can tell. (Broomsticks and Owls forum, Jul 09, 2004)
  • The hands are simple with a fixed thumb and a poseable index finger which hold the one weapon fairly well. (link)
  • The human thumb is fully posable. It rotates in many directions. (link)
  • The removal of the foreskin is NOT what seperates us from the animals either, we have a poseable thumb, we walk upright, we live in groups of others who we don’t know, we have a currency system and a society. (alt.circumcision, Jun 8, 2003)

Analyzed or reported by:

| link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/10/14 |

Commentaries

  1. 1

    Commentary by Brenda Shaw , 2005/10/25 at 7:33 pm

    When my brother was too young to read but already obsessed with dinosaurs, his favourite dinosaur was a “patasaurus”. It took us a while to convince him that it was actually “an apatosaurus”.

  2. 2

    Commentary by Chris Anthony , 2005/11/12 at 6:57 pm

    The second example isn’t an eggcorn - the writer really does mean that the finger can be posed. (I admit that it’s a stretch to call a single finger of an action figure “poseable”, but in context the writer clearly doesn’t intend “opposable”.)

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