Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to
The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.
Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
“Juxtapose” appeared in English, as did so many erudite Latinisms, during the efflorescence of science in the nineteenth century. It is an amalgam of the Latin adverb meaning nearby, “iuxta,” and the English ”-pose” form of the Latin put/place verb (as seen in compose, depose, impose, etc).
Apparently a large number of English speakers, if we can judge by an alternate spelling on nearly a hundred web sites, think the word is “juxtoppose.” The word “oppose” that they add to “juxt-” is another English word built on the Latin put/place verb. It arrived in English through Norman channels, and has been part of the mother tongue since the days of Chaucer.
Interesting how the inventors of this eggcorn have taken the final vowel sound of the first of the compound words in “juxtapose,” the “uh” sound, and used it to initiate the second word in the eggcorn compound.
Samples:
: Posted response to a blog: “I think news organizations are responsible for reporting the truth, not juxtopposed sides.” (http://www.intheav.com/blogs/mattkeltne … hole-story)
Forum entry on a Catholic site: ” His counterpart…blooms into something just as undesirable, albeit juxtopposed to him.” (http://www.angelqueen.org/forum/viewtop … 5182ce3644)
Picture title in published report of a Vermont wildlife organization: “Two starkly contrasted images of Vermont. A black bear in its native habitat juxtopposed to the increasingly fragmented landscape of Vermont.” (https://www.uvm.edu/envnr/vtcfwru/2008_ … report.pdf)
Last edited by kem (2008-07-18 23:15:00)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
Nice catch!
Note that “juxtaposed†‘placed side by side’ doesn’t fit very well in some of these contexts, and in all of them the meaning ‘opposed, contrasted’ does: the speakers really mean â€opposed†as well as spelling it.
This is moving away from the eggcorn prototype: the overall meaning is not the same as the original overall meaning.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline
My citations were a little sparse. Opposition is not always in view in the examples on the web. There are places where “juxtopposed” occurs in contexts that refer to a “side by side” alignment. See, for example, the patent application at http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3962808.html The relevant text there reads “mounting said bearing block element to said channel shaped base member in juxtopposed end-to-end aligned relationship.”
While “juxtaposed” does mean to set items side-by-side, it often implies that the items are put together for purposes of comparing and contrasting. So “juxt-opposing” doesn’t veer too far away from the dynamics of juxtaposition.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
A nice find. I went and looked at more of these. I think the majority are fancy malaprops for “opposed,” as DT noted: Fishbait once pointed out that if something like “opposed” is good, something like “juxtopposed”—which sounds like it should mean the same thing but is longer—has to be even better. Kem’s second example seems to be an instance of this. This is another idea for which I wish we had our own handy buzzword. (I think I’ve used “fancy malaprop” before, but it galumphs.)
But I think some are clearly eggcorns—I’m convinced by Kem’s third example, and maybe the first one. And I found a number of others where “juxtopposed” clearly meant something closer to “next to.”
It’s also interesting that while “juxtaposed with” is preferred by about 5 to 1 to “juxtaposed to,” “juxtopposed to” beats “juxtopposed with” by about 2 to 1. Part of this can be explained by the fact that some people are just plain using the reshaping to mean “opposed,” which more naturally takes “to.” But I also have the impression a greater percentage of the people using the actual eggcorn are choosing “to.”
Offline
The way an eggcorn permutes the meaning of the phrase containing the word that it replaces is wondrous in its complexity. This is another point at which the paradigm word, “eggcorn,” underrepresents the collection it names. An acorn is, well, an acorn, and the mavens of metaphor have not discovered many ways to make the word refer to more than the lowly nut (Shakespeare tried, to be sure. Of his three uses of the word “acorn,” only one is literal. The other two are a simile and a metaphor.). So the new imagery brought in by “egg” and “corn,” though it takes the imagination on a wild ride, pulls up at the same old station. The imagery of some words that we admit as eggcorns, however, carries their embedding phrases into uncharted territories. Sometimes they voyage so far that they reinvent the idioms that contain them. Think, for example, of “Hobbesian choice.” Or “nipping in the butt.” When these voyages of discovery take us so far away from our starting point that we have trouble remembering where home was, we hesitate to call the replacements eggcorns (My impression is that the people who assembled the database of eggcorns on this site were, for better or worse, lovers of travel and aficionados of semantic adventure.).
Last edited by kem (2008-07-19 14:18:40)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline
Aficionados of semantic adventure, to be sure!
But part of the fun of eggcorns, for me, is the unexpectedness of their landing on their feet after all the contortions in the air; winding up with an overall meaning so close to the original’s that you can hardly tell the difference. Like my brother’s phrase: “Six of a dozen and half of one of the other”—it works out to 50% either way. Of course it is a difference of degree, not a dichotomous difference, between that and what you get in classic malapropisms where the overall meaning is wildly inappropriate for the places the structure is used.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-07-19 14:41:37)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline