Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
If your love one gets sicker or dies because of the treatment who can you sue?
How to deal with your love one who is a Compulsive Liar? – shine.yahoo.com/channel/sex/how-to-deal-with-your-love-one-who-is-a-compulsive-liar-207952/
Inform your love one morning that he or she will soon receive a fabulous kiss. Later, call you love with a reminder. www.theromantic.com/kissing/365pt2.htm
She will be honest to her love one, but at the same time seems distant. You will have a good relationship with her, if you allow her freedom. ...
hi5.com/friend/1367321-Anne-Profile-htm
Mushy love messages for your sweetheart and love ones! – Food … ¶
Think I will start this thread about expressing one’s feelings to their love ones. Anyone can come in to do this, especially to those who are not good in …
www.foodherbsspices.com/forum/showthread.php?t=222
There seem to be hundreds of K ghits on this one.
It is, of course, a cognate form; in the standard usage you have a passive participle of the verb “love†used as an adjective, while in the other you have the noun “loveâ€, presumably used in a compound after the fashion of “love interest”, “love nest”, “love child”, etc. The change in imagery is not striking, but definitely there, for me.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Would this loss of adjectivity be similar to the stuffed/stuff peppers switch noted a couple of years ago by jorkel? (http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1105)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Yes. And there are bound to be other examples out there.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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But I don’t think it’s really an eggcorn. Maybe an unimportant subset.
Because the attributive noun is a form of adjective.
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Deletion of final +d/+ed in a participial adjective is pretty common, esp. in fixed phrases. Textbooks always seem to cite the examples “skimmed milk” >>”skim milk” and “iced cream” >> “ice cream” (which makes me wonder whether that participial +d might be lactose intolerant).
I am admittedly surprised how many hits this is getting, and I’m also a bit surprised that the d-deletion is occurring before a w sound. But couldn’t this just be an example of a common sound change?
Also, DT, what imagery change do you see at work?
Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-07-19 02:45:15)
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Contrary to a lot of linguistic pontifications, I am convinced that grammar is meaningful, and the meanings of grammatical morphemes like -ed consist precisely in adjusting “imagery”, if you define imagery rightly. They often make adjustments that are obvious (like the difference between “govern” and “government”), but often they are subtle. Very often the change is in what entity in a conceptual scene is designated: e.g. in the conceptual scene of one entity (prototypically a person or group of people) controlling how another entity (prototypically a large group of people like the population of a town or a country) behaves, “govern” designates (and locates in and tracks through conceived time) the process of controlling, whereas “government” (in its most common usage) designates the group of people who control the others, and ”(the) governed” designates those who are controlled.
The difference between loved and love is similar: loved describes a thing, typically a person, who is the recipient of love (it designates the relationship of love, not the person: it is an adjective, not a noun); love (the noun) designates the process itself (but not located in and tracked through time in the way the verb love does).
When I say a loved one I am extra conscious of the fact that the understood subject, the person who will probably be coded as a possessor (e.g. myself in my loved ones ), has in the past established this relationship of loving the designated one, has in fact loved the one . In love one this specification is greatly backgrounded (though of course not denied), and a more vague notion substituted, which might include ideas like that the one is destined for love, or loves the possessor, or is the one the possessor goes to for love, etc.
It’s subtle, but to me it’s very definitely there.
And it’s there in the contrasts you mention between iced cream and ice cream, or skimmed milk and skim milk. (Lactose-intolerant _-ed_ — I like it! Did a milk cow use to be a milked cow? I doubt it. Cf that pre-eminently wonderful eggcorn: “Lack toast and tolerant” http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/contribute … t-page-58/ )
I’ll agree that it’s likely to be phonologically motivated, but that phonologically motivated change has, for me at least, the semantic (imagery) consequences I described.
I’ll also agree, it’s not blatant enough for this to be a prototypical eggcorn. But it’s the same kind of thing.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-07-19 13:02:02)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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