Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Not sure exactly where to fit this in the eggcorn typology, but here is the example I just came across:
“Di Maria is a great pickup for us, one of the best players in the [U-20] World Cup period. I was there for a couple of days in Lisbon, and just watching him, the kid is just brewing with confidence.”
http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/st … d=tab6pos1
Googling the phrase yields 714 results, though a few of them describe beer-making, tea-steeping, and other unrelated agentive brewings. Thoughts?
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Welcome, bushwah, to the site! It looks like you brought something very interesting with you. Thanks!
I would speculate that it is an eggcorn of “brimming with confidence” and it follows the classic path: “brimming”, in a somewhat obscure sense meaning to be “bursting” or “filled to the brim” with ideas/confidence/etc. could have been eggcorned in the mind of the listener with the much more common phrase “brewing”. I speculate that the imagery involved has something to do with the idea of something being continually produced as in brewing or percolating, i.e., something “bubbling over”. You just might have a good one here, bushwah. What say ye, fellow hunters?
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I second that welcome, Bushwah. And nice analysis, Booboo. I just wanted to follow up on Booboo’s comment. I had never really thought about the metaphorical picture behind “brimming with confidence” before, but the image figures people as a container and confidence as a kind of liquid (or even beverage?). Of course, I think the shared initial br- cluster is probably more important than any unconscious beverage metaphors, but they may be influencing the reshaping.
And I also went looking for “brew/brews/brewed/brewing confidence” as a reshaping of “breed confidence.” Not too many hits for any of them, but somewhere from 8 to a few dozen for all of them. Many of the relevant hits were from newspaper sports columns or sports blogs—a real brewing ground for the kinds of things we’re interested in. (“The brewing ground” gets over 100 raw hits.) I wonder whether the breed/brim idioms are intersecting in Bushwah’s find. Maybe not.
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As a lark, a joke really, I looked up “breeding with confidence”. I got 7 hits and fortunately none of them had a thing to do with Viagra! They were all from bonafide animal breeding associations. Anyway, I think it may be safe to say there’s not much of any obvious link for breed/brim.
Not to be tangential, but the discussion does bring to mind the quote “familiarity breeds contempt”. In that sense of the word, brew could be substituted. “Brews” only had one hit for that particular quote, but many more for the overall intent: “Brews discontent” had 103, “breeds discontent”, 13k. “Brews resentment” – 57, “breeds resentment”- 29k. There could be some eggcorning going on here, but either word is accurate. I do think, however, that it helps build the case of the subconcious imagery of “roiling”, “bubbling”, etc. It’s interesting that these examples are all dealing with a negative undercurrent in the psyche, whereas the original submission dealt with positive attributes. Thanks again, Bushwah, for an interesting discussion topic. Oh, and Patschwieterman, do these examples change your evaluations at all, concerning the subconcious imagery, that is? It’s always hard to speculate what’s going on in the minds of others- but it sure is fun!
Last edited by booboo (2007-08-13 19:05:40)
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Oh—I didn’t mean to dismiss the “bubbling, etc.” idea—I think it’s both possible and interesting. It’s just one of those things that I think is so hard to test. We never know what a writer is thinking consciously, so what they’re thinking subconsciously is even more subknowable.
And Booboo, you can just use “Pat”—the other handle is so darn long. I think I’ll probably change it one of these days.
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Okay, Pat, will do, even though it’s fun to see four consonants in a row, sometimes!
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That’s FIVE consonants—don’t shortchange me, man!
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