granted » granite
Spotted in the wild:
- One of the things many movie people take for granite is catering. (link)
- Make a list of your blessings. Think this one through. What you take for granite is many times a blessing. Any day above ground is a GREAT day. (link)
- There’s no way I can take this anymore. I put myself out there and let everyone have a piece of me. I’m finally just not going to let people take advantage of me and take me for granite anymore. (link)
- My son has been to other clinics, but none has been so beneficial. You focus on skills, not scrimaging. I also liked the attention to detail. Nothing was taken for granite. Well worth the time, money, and travel. (link)
Analyzed or reported by:
- Arnold Zwicky at Language Log (Eggcorn and malaprop among the flowers)
- Mark Liberman at Language Log (Don't take your language for granite)
Things taken for granite are hewn in stone.
The phonetics of this substitution are explained by Mark Liberman:
> You might think that the sound correspondence “granted” = “granite” is only approximate, but at least for some English speakers it can be exact.
>
>There are two independent steps. The first and commoner one is for /’VntV/ (i.e. /nt/ when preceded by a stressed vowel and followed by an unstressed one) to weaken to [n]. A common example is the pronunciation of twenty as if it were spelled “twenny”, or center as if it were spelled “senner”. This sort of thing is often deprecated as sloppy speaking, but in fact most Americans do it all the time. I certainly do. If you can find an American speaker who never reduces /nt/ to [n] in such words, you’ve either found an extraordinarily fussy speaker, or one of the few Americans speaking a dialect that weakens /t/ in a different way in these contexts, e.g. to something like [ts].
>
>The other step in making granted sound exactly the same as granite is to devoice the final /d/.
1
Commentary by Dan W , 2005/03/22 at 11:09 pm
This was used as an intentional pun in the song “I’m a Mineralist”,
which includes the phrase “take for granite”. (The song also
describes Philp Glass as a mineralist, followed by about two
or three seconds of Glass-like music; it’s very funny.) I believe
this from from “Fictictious Sports” by Carla Bley.
2
Commentary by SanLei Stone - Granite Exporter,China , 2005/11/06 at 4:19 pm
SanLei Stone is a granite manufacturer and exporter who offers integrated solutions for granite related projects. SanLei Stone supplys all kinds of granite products from China with its knight sarvice
3
Commentary by SanLei Stone - Granite Exporter,China , 2005/11/06 at 4:20 pm
SanLei Stone is a granite manufacturer and exporter who offers integrated solutions for granite related projects. SanLei Stone supplys all kinds of granite products from China with its knight sarvice
4
Commentary by froglady , 2006/08/11 at 6:34 pm
A public service announcement ran on TV during my childhood in the 1970s, in which the voiceover was “Water - don’t take it for granted.” What I heard was “Water - don’t take it for granite,” which I found very puzzling. I could only imagine that the message was that if we didn’t converve water, it would all dry up and we’d be left only with rock.