hominem » homonym
Spotted in the wild:
- “I don’t speak for the “Religious right”, nor am I sure what is meant by the “Religious right”. I am however, quite suspect of those who attach labels in order to launch ad homonym attacks in lieu of legitimate debate.” (link)
- Argumentum ad homonym or ‘Argument against the man’ is indeed the logical fallacy of claiming what a person says is untrue simply because of who it is (as*hole) who is making the argument rather than the validity of the argument itself. (link)
- Your response to my questions was disrespectful, ad homonym, and tangential. (link)
Analyzed or reported by:
- Tony Cooper (alt.usage.english, Feb 26, 2006)
It is only very rarely that we enter non-eggcorns into the database, but I am making an exception for ad homonym.
First of all, homonyms — or rather, homophones, i.e. words that sound alike but aren’t necessarily spelled alike — enter into the genesis of eggcorns themselves.
Second, because the ad homonym malapropism illustrates very nicely what elements are required to make an eggcorn: it is a non-standard reshaping of an established term (check!), homonym and hominem are pronounced nearly the same (check!), but it isn’t a re-interpretation that is based on (a correct understanding of the semantics of) the target word homonym.
In a typical eggcorn, the writer understands the sense of the word he or she actually employs; the problem is that the use takes up the place already occupied by a different word, often part of a set phrase. Here, however, the eggcorn users don’t give any sign that they know what a homonym is. In one of the examples, the writer obviously believes that ad homonym means against the man in Latin. It’s the Latin that is faulty, along with the recollection of what the expression is supposed to be, precisely. (And spell-checkers might have had their bit to add, too. Case in point: the spell-checker I just used on this entry didn’t know hominem and suggested hominid. Ad hominid also yields over a hundred Google hits, compared to several thousand for ad homonym(s).)
The replacement of a “complicated phrase” by another “complicated phrase” is rarely an eggcorn: often, the writer is unclear about the meaning of both, not only about the original.
1
Commentary by Candace , 2006/03/14 at 1:12 am
I have been asked to find a homonym for the two words:
check/cheque
can you help me out
2
Commentary by Chris Waigl , 2006/03/26 at 7:15 am
@Candace: Cheque and check are a pair of alternative spellings for the same word, not homonyms (unless you count other senses of check). You’ll be more likely to find the first spelling in British English and the second in American English.
3
Commentary by Sean B. Palmer , 2006/04/20 at 9:33 pm
How about “Czech” as a homonym?
4
Commentary by Chris Waigl , 2006/04/20 at 9:39 pm
Well, Czech, check and cheque are certainly homophones. There is some variation about the definition of “homonym” in the literature: some require identical spelling as well as pronunciation (i.e. that two words have to be homographs in addition to homophones), others treat “homonym” as a synonym “homophones”. Yet another set of people bring in etymology.
An examples for unquestionable homonyms is the lime triad: the three senses of lime don’t even converge etymologically.
5
Commentary by Mod , 2006/09/27 at 1:56 pm
www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/…
this thread uses the ‘ad homonym’ in a wonderful manner:
R: “Haekel [sic] had fraudulently substituted dog embryos for the human ones”
P: It’s an ad homonym to call Haccle sick. And you misspell his name too. Heck, you can’t even spell sick.
To technically correct as mentioned, since it is a homophone not homonym, but bravery is the Seoul of wheat.