Eggcorn Forum

Nice eggcorn.

I had never pictured the up-tick as a check-mark in the margin. I always had (perhaps influenced by a clock ticking?) the image of a measuring instrument with a dial, e.g. a pressure gauge, that ticks upwards when the pressure rises by a clearly discernible amount. Interesting how we can do that: get quite different pictures that, in a very important sense, amount to the same thing.

Kem wrote

Your awareness, in comparison to that of other people, is not rising-it gets no tick on the psychological Big Board.

Only it does get a tick, just later than other people’s.

To me the picture that came to mind was not a culture-wide Big Board but a personal one: my Board doesn’t register (with an uptick of whatever sort) a change in what I’m supposed to be aware of/measuring, as quickly as other people’s Boards do.

Does that make sense?

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-06-24 09:33:10)

Both uptake and uptick are comparison nouns. They evoke images of one event being selected from a group of similar events.

I’m also puzzled, nilep, as you are, by the apparently reversed slope of familiarity. I would have thought the word “uptake” was more familiar in the general population of English speakers than the word “uptick.” As we have noted before, however, several factors can affect the slope. One is the immediate idomatic context-the meaning of a word in an idiom can be less familiar than the meaning of a word outside the idiom. Another is segregated populations of speakers. Words can get preferential play in some circles. In the case of “uptick,” we may also be looking at a third factor, the colonization factor. Just as viruses go wild when they encounter populations with no native immunity, certain words seem to have a metaphoric potency that makes them explode into the language space. In their rapid expansion they overshoot their natural boundaries and become “pop” words that show up in the strangest places. Estimations of word familiarity can be skewed by this overshoot. In the long run the encyclopedia entry for Paris Hilton will be shorter than the one for Margaret Thatcher, I should think; for now, though, Hilton’s name is the name we conjure with. In the same way, some people believe get bonus points for using the rapidly colonizing “uptick” as much as possible. A fourth factor we have to consider is meaning creep. New meanings of old words can put reverse pressure on old meanings. The word “uptake” has gained a second life in recent years because of its use in medicine and biology (“Uptake” refers to the rate at which chemicals enter into metabolic pathways.). Perhaps the new medical connotations of “uptake” have made the older sense of “uptake” as comprehension seem a little archaic.

Last edited by kem (2008-06-24 18:27:12)

I had never thought of the idiom “slow on the take” as a variant of “slow on the uptake.” I guess I thought the word “take” in the idiom was an example of the usage of “take” as interpretation. (“What’s your take on the situation?”). But you may be right-the inclusion of the slow/quick lexeme in the idiom does seem to point toward some association with uptake.

“Take” meaning “interpretation” is a relatively recent addition to English. It might even derive from the sense of “uptake” that has been encoded in the “slow/quick on the uptake” idiom.