Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The original idiom seems to evoke pulling up courage from the depths of one’s being. The reshaping apparently imagines courage as leaking out of the self in dribs and drabs, and one has to plug up that leak and husband courage to have enough to achieve some particularly worthy end. I don’t think there are more than a few dozen of these. Examples:
I find it unbelievable that a man responsible for the deaths of probably a hundred people up to that point would die at the hands of a little girl, who would barely be able to plug up the courage to move during the torture and murder of her babysitter before her very eyes let alone thrust a sharp object hard enough into a fully grown, and insane, man to kill him.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0283877/usercomments?start=50
Women should be able to plug up the courage and go up there and confront the guy you like..
http://ying287.blogspot.com/2007/10/whi … rl-or.html
For me, undergoing those few short moments of feeling pure, raw emotions, be it pain, hurt, fear or whatever it is in any given moment, is certainly worth it, as once you plug up courage and dive right into the very core of any emotion, you will find a presence there that pervades all of existence, a presence of Grace, Peace, Stillness that is everywhere, in everything, that can’t go anywhere because it is in fact your very own nature.
http://www.holistic-community.co.uk/art … erapy.html
One day his mother finally plugged up courage to be very firm with him and accomplished what she could not achieve for a long time.
http://cockroachcatcher.blogspot.com/20 … -peas.html
The new move wore me out and I spent a week trying to plug up the courage to install my new system
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch … inton.html
I’m plugging up the courage to get into profiling.
http://www.toomuchcoffee.com/index.php? … ic&p=63345
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This has everything you could want in an eggcorn: near-homophones, plausible semantic reshaping, and a somewhat opaque original.
I think Pat is right on the semantics – plucking bits of courage upward becomes plugging up a leak against the loss of courage.
More to the point, the original “pluck up” is somewhat obscure. The verb pluck is not very common (12.9M raw Google hits, versus 173M for pull and 99.6M for drag). And pluck up is a small portion of that usage – mostly in the phrase pluck up (the) courage.
Google indexes 431,000 hits for {pluck the} and 252,000 for {pluck a}, which I take to mean pluck is usually followed by a noun phrase rather than a preposition/particle. There are 252,000 hits for {pluck out}, the most commonly co-occurring preposition.
Google being what it is, it’s hard to get a handle on pluck up with and without courage. There are 227,000 raw hits for {pluck up}, but only 101,000 for pluck up without courage. Then, oddly, there are 229,000 raw hits for pluck up plus courage. Clearly this is an artifact of the search algorithm, rather than a real count.
The bottom line, however, is that pluck up seems not to occur very often, except in the phrase at issue here.
By the by, there are 242,000 raw hits for {plug up}.
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