Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Another one worth looking at, I think. I found about half of the 530 hits to be solid. It started with 163k hits, but most of them had to do with a book store. I filtered the search as follows:
exact phrase: “title wave”
with all the words: “flood”
without the words: “books” “bookstore” “blog” “music” (all these were getting in the way of good hits).
I thought to include the search procedure in case it might help other eggcorn hunters.
Samples:
I’ve always had dreams about outrunning a title wave, and in most of my … on a very high bridge and on a curve we fell off and below us was a huge flood. ...
www.spursreport.com/forums/archive/inde … 14268.html – 21k –
has struck Indonesia and many wonder if they will face a large title wave that will destroy many more lives. From the great flood of Noah that took the …
invitation.to/dance/jewish-walterschwartz-6.htm – 6k – Cached – Similar
Categories: Hurricane | Tornado | Earthquake | Fire | Flood | Drought | Famine | Plague | End Of The World | War | Volcano | Tsunami | Title Wave | Tropical …
www.aboutus.org/BadNewSnetwork.com – 20k
Okay, so now…the imagery? I’m pretty much drawing a blank here. I’m hoping you all can help. If there’s no imagery substitution, I don’t think there’s much of an eggcorn in this case. No imagery would make it just a random dud. The only thing that I can remotely attach to the possible eggcorn is that of hurricanes, which have names or “titles”. What do you think?
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I’ve been pondering this for a while, and I’m starting to wonder if we’ve got a category between eye dialect and eggcorn. I don’t think the utterers are spelling it “title” because it’s the closest they can come to the correct spelling. Nor do I think the utterers have any imagery in mind. This one kind of reminds me of my own post in which I thought an ampersand was an “ambersand.” Perhaps we should call this find as an ambersand—something made up of word components for no apparent reason, but not just for the purpose of spelling it in print.
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It’s not likely, but it is possible that the notion of rank might lie behind this; most waves are just commoners but a titled wave is an aristocrat, something out of the ordinary, perhaps a king-size wave?
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I actually like Peter’s imagery explanation. Little waves are just waves, but a really big wave deserves a title.
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