Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
One of my wife’s more malapropistic friends asked recently how her ‘carpet funnel syndrome’ was doing. “Carpet funnel’ yields no serious hits but ‘carpet tunnel’ has nearly 2000. The cardboard inners onto which carpets are wound are usually wide enough to insert an arm and it may be that the altrnative imagery, if any, is of an arm that cannot be bent.
A narrow tunnel in the wrist-the carpet tunnel-contains tendons and the median nerve, which conducts sensation from the thumb, index, and middle fingers and …
www.ssiltd.co.uk/glossary/details.asp?item=748 – 14k – Cached
I guess im not complaining but im not getting any carpet tunnel, tinkly hands etc, no normal sides. I can tell im getting cutter. ...
www.professionalmuscle.com/ forums/showthread.php?t=12132 – 39k – Cached
Fluoride: Hypothyroidism, arthritis, osteoporosis, carpet tunnel syndrome, birth defects, hip fractures, liver kidney, musculoskeletal and neurotoxicity, ...
rainbowglow.net/facts.htm – 23k – Cached
those bumps have nothing to do with carpet tunnel you have psoriasis im a doctor and i know this for a fact those bumps are nothing to ignore, ...
sg.answers.yahoo.com/question/ index?qid=20080128162516AAJUkYt – 32k – Cached
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Interesting imagery suggestion. I wouldn’t have thought of it, but it makes sense. I was thinking of fibers impenging on the tunnel of the nerve, but that’s just because that’s all I could come up with, from a reverse-engineering approach. I wish we could ask one of the users.
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It’s a good image (perhaps the speakers/writers think it feels scratchy, like rubbing your arms on carpet?). But maybe the people using the term really don’t have any image in mind at all, and it is just a mishearing of an unfamiliar word (carpal run into tunnel could easily be heard as “carpe[t] tunnel”). Other than doctors or physical therapists, who had heard of “carpal” until RSIs from computers become common?
I’m not saying it doesn’t work as an eggcorn (I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination); it may well be one, because there is an interesting imagery that comes about from it. But I think the case can also be made for it’s being a mishearing.
Feeling quite combobulated.
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True. Could be a mishearing. But, yes, many eggcorns have thus been born. The intriguing thing is that even if it’s misheard, that doesn’t preclude any alternate imagery – and trying to pin down exactly what that might be.
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A fairly potent image, though unfortunately completely inappropriate, would be that of Cleopatra being unrolled from the ‘tunnel’ of a carpet for the delectatiion of Caesar, or was it Mark Antony? Carpet-carrying slaves who had a lot of such duties could suffer from both carpet and carpal tunnel syndrome I suppose.
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