Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Hidebound, according to the American Heritage on-line dictionary is an adjective meaning “1. Stubbornly prejudiced, narrow-minded, or inflexible.” An article on Barney Frank in the New York Times on May 13, 2008, quotes Michael Oxley, former congressman from Ohio saying “I think that Barney is misunderstood in some quarters as just being a hard-bound ideological liberalâ€
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This does make sense as a potential reshaping. A hidebound ideologue is hard in the sense of being inflexible. I don’t see where bound comes into it, though, except as a remnant of hidebound. Would a more moderate thinker be a paperback liberal?
This might be an idiom blend, or it may be on the “bleeding edge” of eggcornicity. I suspect some eggcornistas will prefer it as a “single barreled” form (as opposed to the double barreled eggcorn, in which both constituent morphemes contribute meaning to the reshaping).
It is also one of those forms that frustrates search attempts. Google searches for “hardbound ideological”, “hardbound liberal”, and “hardbound conservative” each return thousands of hits, but for (hardbound) books on various political topics. (Searches for the hyphenated hard-bound suggest the non-hyphenated hardbound and include results with hard-bound, hardbound and hard bound.)
Nice find, rae.
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There are some factors that work in favor of this being an eggcorn. For instance, we take a less familiar word and replace it with a more familiar one. And as for the imagery, I don’t think we need to take the book analogy too literally; hardbound may simply convey a sense of something which is durable or hard to take apart.
I can’t seem to get any Google hits for “hardbound liberal” or “hardbound conservative” when I include the quotation marks in my search, so this doesn’t seem to be a very widespread occurrence.
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