cart » cat
Spotted in the wild:
- The feeling of the people is that the police stinks and it is rotten. You, within days of assuming the leadership of the force, announced what you regard as your reform programmes. Isn’t it like putting the cat before the horse? Why didn’t you carry out internal purge and cleansing first before this outward approach? (NigerianMuse, February 06, 2005)
- A population policy that is not predicated on the result of a credible census, in our view, is tantamount to putting the cat before the horse. (THISDAYOnLine.com, Nov. 16, 2004)
- Before deregulation, pundits had expected the Obasanjo government to put the nations infrastructures into good working order if not for anything to make the deregulation effective, unfortunately the present arrangement is akin to putting the cat before the horse. (Max Uba : Deregulation and the Empty Jerry Can, (Niger Delta Congress))
- But perhaps to expect that the Attorney-General’s Office and the Government in general can eradicate corruption is to put the cat before the horse. (Daily Nation (Kenya), September 13, 1998)
- I enjoyed this entry, but i think you put the cat before the horse. (Comment on online diary entry, Apr 9, 2001)
This eggcorn, which in some case might be a typo from omitting to hit one key, was reported by on the American Dialect Society mailing list by Mark Peters, who saw it in a student paper.
It seems to be most frequent in writings by people from Africa — maybe because the historical image of horse-drawn carts is less present there than in societies of European culture.
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Commentary by nat , 2006/03/22 at 8:52 am
“maybe because the historical image of horse-drawn carts is less present there than in societies of European culture”?? Are you kiddin’ us here? _Historical_ image?? In most of these countries horses and donkeys are more common than cars. Your usual explanation - local accents - would make a lot more sense. It’s more likely to be the influence of British English (where the “r” in cart is not pronounced) combined with the African accent, which makes cat sound like “caht”.
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Commentary by Bigjohn , 2006/03/22 at 6:50 pm
This mis-phrase obviously originated in Boston.
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Commentary by Nigel Pond , 2006/03/28 at 7:59 pm
What’s this nonsense about the Brits not pronouncing the “r” in “cart”? Of course we pronounce it, we just don’t swallow our “r’s” like Americans do.
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Commentary by Richard Carroll , 2006/03/30 at 12:21 am
Dear Nigel Pond: I believe the American pronunciation of “R” is closer to historical British. Since you believe Americans swallow our “r’s”, should I say that you Brits have decided to regurgitate yours?
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Commentary by Nigel Pond , 2006/04/03 at 8:35 pm
Richard, even if American pronunciation of “R†is closer to historical British, so what? We do pronounce the “R” in “cart” - if we did not, it would come out as “cat”
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Commentary by Donald J.Mac Donald , 2006/04/07 at 5:09 am
You heard it(cat before the horse)in Boston!This may be the Boston pronunciation of “cart”.
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Commentary by nat , 2006/04/12 at 1:07 pm
Dear Nigel Pond: think about the sound between c and t in “cart”. Now think about the sound between f and th in “father”. Or indeed, the sound between f and th in “farther”. Now think about how an American (who isn’t from Boston) might pronounce those syllables. Do you see what we mean?
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Commentary by NW , 2006/08/15 at 1:28 pm
Southern Britons do _not_ pronounce an [r] of any kind in ‘cart’. Nor does anyone, anywhere on earth, ’swallow’ any kind of sound. The words ‘cat’ and ‘cart’ have exactly the same consonants in Southern Britain. They differ only in their vowels. One has the vowel written ‘a’, and one has the vowel written ‘ar’. Even if you think you hear some kind of [r], you don’t: there isn’t one: the ‘ar’ is just a pure long vowel.