disillusioned » dissolutioned

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • A dissolutioned travel writer seeks to prove that the Aurora Islands disappeared from the South Atlantic. (Amazon.com, from a user-contributed list)
  • I was a bit dissolutioned with playing in England anyway, but I didn’t really know how dissolutioned I was until I came out here. (BBC Radio 1, interview with DJ Derek Dahlarge)
  • Gregory Hines is superlative as the dissolutioned American tap-dancer. Isabella Rossolini is charming as his Russian wife. (Amazon.co.uk, user-contributed DVD review)
  • I became very dissolutioned with sites like Myspace because,as social networking tools they’re only based on “virtual” interaction rather than actual face to face meetings and friendships. (Meetup.com, forum contribution, Sep 6, 2005)

Here in eggcorn land, we tend to be hesitant about attaching the eggcorn label to substitutions between two Latinate, Greek-derived, or otherwise learned words. As in the famous alligator/allegory example, these often arise from a lack of familiarity with the meaning and origin of both words: most are malapropisms rather than eggcorns.

On the other hand, borrowings or neologisms of this type are so common that English speakers do indeed have an intuition of the meaning of constituents like _dis_ or _solution_. This is why _dissolution_, evoking a sense close to “falling apart”, makes sense if you haven’t noticed the _illusion_ part of _disillusioned_.

| link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2007/06/03 |

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.