Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
My mother-in-law says this and I cringe every time I hear it. I used to want to correct her but now it’s just funny. Her five children (which includes my husband) also say it.
Oh never mind, I just searched and realized I am not the first to post on this.
Last edited by sarhar (2008-04-16 15:25:46)
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Welcome to the Eggcorn Forum, sarhar.
Supposably is (allegedly) somewhat common in non-standard dialects of English. In fact, a Google search for it will turn up page after page of commentators lamenting it as a bad, wrong, illogical, etc. usage.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Supposably
Ironically, Google indexes very few actual uses of the word, though this one seems to be legitimate.
Supposably im 8 wks pregnant i took the home test and came out positive..miscarriage??
http://au.answers.yahoo.com/answers2/fr … 957AA3MC32
I wouldn’t call this an eggcorn, though. By my definition, an eggcorn has to be both phonologically similar to the original word, and contain new semantic imagery that makes sense to the people who use it. To repeat my favorite example, an acorn is an egg-shaped corn (seed).
I might call a supposably a morphological reshaping, not an eggcorn. Then again, the definition of ‘eggcorn’ is not carved in stone; one of the things this forum serves to do is to define the emerging category.
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2613
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There was an article on these other (eggcorn-related) categories:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 04805.html
I think there was a category known as “esculators” which included such reshapings as “simular.” I’d start with the article and see if it becomes apparent.
Last edited by jorkel (2008-04-17 14:56:09)
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I expecially adhor this misprenunciation!
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