Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Just caught this in a SpaceFlight Now headline. A quick google seems to confirm it as a genuine eggcorn (for “fine-tune”).
Mars-bound spacecraft fine turns course for landing¶ PASADENA, Calif.—NASA engineers have adjusted the flight path of the Phoenix
Mars Lander, […]
Other examples (all from the Internet)
Fine turn the Freeplay setting
The second case study demonstrates how to optimize a difficult protein separation processes with the system, and then to fine turn
the operation based on …
You can fine turn the alignment of the images by selecting them – hold the Shift key as you click each in turn – and, from the Drawing
toolbar, choose Align
We do this by teaching new people entering the business, important basics associated with the manufacturing process, and fine turn
the skills of those who are already associated with the industry to help them contribute to their firms and advance their level of value.
The facility features grass as well as mat-hitting surfaces, target greens and an expansive putting green to fine turn your game.
Last edited by rulavi (2008-04-11 03:40:16)
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Welcome to the forum, rulavi.
I thought that we already had turn>>tune somewhere on the site, but I can’t find it. If this really is the first posting, it’s pretty remarkable that such a basic reshaping is just getting attention now. Pretty cool. And pretty convincing, I’d say—fine-tuning something these days often means turning something else, esp. a knob. And there’s even a small possibility that a few people may be thinking of “turning” in the sense of furniture-making (or its metaphorical transfer in “a well-turned phrase”).
I really appreciate the trouble you went to to provide examples—and you clearly didn’t just take the Google summaries, either. A lot of people don’t bother, and the citations really help. So I hope I’m not pushing it by suggesting that since you went to so much trouble, you may as well just throw in the URLs with the egs so that others can simply click on your citations. But that’s just a suggestion for the future.
At the moment, “a well-tuned phrase” gets 7 hits, but they may all be letter-omission typos; hard to say.
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I find it strange that “fine tuning” would be unfamiliar enough to trigger a substitution. But in the age of self-tuning digital display receivers, the fine tuning knob may well be a candidate for the endangered species list.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Perhaps there is some idiom-entanglement here; the notion of turning meat on a spit until cooked to perfection gave us ‘done to a turn’ and sometimes even ‘done to a fine turn’ – one more crank of that handle would have been too many. As one who has tried to tune a fiddle – let’s not talk about playing it – I can confirm that at times fine tuning is fine turning.
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Re the “well-tuned phrase”, yes, that could easily be an omission typo. Insertion of the r in fine-turn is much less likely to be a finger-slip. We should keep an ear out for the well-tuned phrase, as in a spoken version it would be clearer that a real morpheme-substitution was taking place.
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