Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
When I worked in mental health, there was a term for a certain class of medication side-effects that I saw written both ways in different sources. Though the words “extraparametal” and “extrapyramidal” look quite different, in practice they are pronounced pretty much identically, so it’s confusing. I had assumed that “extraparametal” was based on the word “parameter”, but it’s not in my dictionary, though googling it yields 18 hits! But, if we assume that “extraparametal” isn’t really a word, does that mean that “extraparametal symptoms” isn’t an eggcorn? In other words, does the substituted word have to be a “real” word for it to count as an eggcorn?
DixonOffline
If it were based on parameter, you would expect extraparametral, not extraparametal, wouldn’t you? Yet extraparametral got 0 ghits! (That’s harder to do than you might think!) Seriously, people often use parameter to mean “boundary, limit” rather than “dimension” or more orthodox mathematical senses, so I would have expected extraparametral ‘outside (the normal) boundaries’. (Of course in a few hours or days this post will give it a couple of ghits!)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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