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Chris -- 2018-04-11

#1 2008-11-23 11:40:07

Jim Dixon
Member
From: St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Registered: 2006-08-11
Posts: 44

run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

“Up close he was nothing more than the run-off-the-mill pompous politician, his diminutive figure notwithstanding.”
—from “An Education System Worthy of Malaysia” by Bakri Musa, New York: Writers Club Press, ©2003, page 7.

“This was of utmost significance, a wand of God, far removed from the run-off-the mill coincidence.”
—from “Good Over Evil” by Meche Okwesili, Victoria, B.C.: Trafford, ©2003, page 273.

“But connoisseurs of the dark art such as yourself can’t just go around watching any run off the mill movie villain from any run off the mill movie.”
—from http://ezinearticles.com/?Theatrical-Th … id=1630904

“Our tip is to tell the kids that you’re all going on a ‘boring’ run-off-the-mill city tour and watch their little faces as your aquatic tour bus splashes into the river.”
—from http://www.londonnet.co.uk/london-eye/river-cruises

Last edited by Jim Dixon (2008-11-23 11:41:27)

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#2 2008-11-23 23:10:02

Dixon Wragg
Eggcornista
From: Cotati, California
Registered: 2008-07-04
Posts: 1375

Re: run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

Yeah that seems like a real eggcorn, alright. A new one to me.

And it’s always nice to see another Dixon—plus, my middle name is James.

Trivially;

Dixon James Wragg

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#3 2008-11-24 09:06:23

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2714
Website

Re: run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

I guess being run off the mill is sort of like being run off the press? It’s certainly a malapropism, but I’d like to get the “reasonable but non-standard” imagery of an eggcorn clearer in my mind.


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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#4 2008-11-24 12:02:58

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

Re: run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

Same here. I don’t see the alternate imagery. A “run off the mill” could be just another way of saying “run of the mill,” couldn’t it? Anything that produces a continuous flow would be susceptible to an “of/off” switch. Products come “off the mill” the way papers come “off the press.”


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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#5 2008-11-24 16:52:20

Dixon Wragg
Eggcornista
From: Cotati, California
Registered: 2008-07-04
Posts: 1375

Re: run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

kem wrote:

Same here. I don’t see the alternate imagery. A “run off the mill” could be just another way of saying “run of the mill,” couldn’t it?

Does the imagery really have to be alternate? I thought it would be an eggcorn even if the imagery was pretty much the same, as long as the word(s) used to describe the imagery was different (although sounding much like the correct word, of course).

I thought that I was pretty clear on the definition of an eggcorn, but I may have missed an aspect. In truth, the concept seems a bit fuzzy around the edges for everybody—even more than most concepts.

Dixon

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#6 2008-11-24 18:57:52

Chris Waigl
Eggcorn Faerie
From: London, UK
Registered: 2005-10-14
Posts: 115
Website

Re: run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

This is a clear eggcorn for me—and it’s on the list of eggcorns I used to employ myself: I used to think it was “run-off-the-mill” based on the idea that the product was directly taken off the mill. It’s on my ever-growing backlog and has been there for a long time, partly because there are a great many of of >> off and off >> of eggcorns.

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#7 2008-11-25 11:48:09

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

Re: run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

Does the imagery really have to be alternate? I thought it would be an eggcorn even if the imagery was pretty much the same, as long as the word(s) used to describe the imagery was different (although sounding much like the correct word, of course).

A subtle question, Dixon. No two words, as you know, are perfect synonyms. Any alternate phrasing that employs a similar-sounding, sense-producing word must therefore produce some degree of new imagery, however slight. It is the degree of this switch in imagery that makes or breaks an eggcorn. If the new imagery turns the sense of the phrase in a new direction, the switch is not an eggcorn. Take, for example, the spoonerism “the Lord is a shoving leopard.” “Shoving leopard” and “loving shepherd” are too distant in their semantics to be called an eggcorn. But when the imageries of the phrase with the word and the phrase with its substitution are alternate paths to the same overall sentiment, as in the recently discussed “skim milk” and “skimp milk,” then we are in eggcorn territory.

I think most of us on the forum agree in principle with what I just wrote, though each of us, coming as we do from various language interests, has our own way of saying it. Many of us, though, want to carry the definition a little further and address a problem at the other end of the imagery shift. Some of the alternate imageries provided by the substitution of a term don’t get far enough away from the original imagery to make the substitution semantically interesting. Because they are not interesting, the notion of an eggcorn seems to be devalued if we admit these weak examples into the category. Take, for example, the substitutions of “hunger pain” for “hunger pang,” “once and a while” for “once in a while,” and “in route” for “en route.” Arguably, some shift in imagery occurs in these examples. But the new imagery doesn’t light any fires, ring any bells or bang any pots. For my part, I would prefer to say that these close-in-imagery switches are not honest eggcorns.

“Run of the mill” and “run off the mill,” as I understand these two phrases, do not seem to me to diverge enough to be interesting. But different people see different images. Chris seems to be suggesting that she sees something compelling in the “off” version. I don’t fully follow her reasoning, but I think she is saying that she feels an immediacy in the “off” version, perhaps by analogy to “right off the grill” or “run off a quick copy,” that isn’t in the “of” version. To me, “run of the mill” also suggests immediacy-something that a current session of the mill has produced. So “run off the mill” adds little to the imagery. I have never been seduced by this switch, however, so my view may be more tinged with ennui than hers.

Last edited by kem (2008-11-26 23:24:11)


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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#8 2008-11-25 17:28:01

Dixon Wragg
Eggcornista
From: Cotati, California
Registered: 2008-07-04
Posts: 1375

Re: run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

kem wrote:

...Some of the alternate imageries provided by the substitution of a term don’t get far enough away from the original imagery to make the substitution semantically interesting. Because they are not interesting, the notion of an eggcorn seems to be devalued if we admit these weak examples into the category. Take, for example, the substitutions of “hunger pain” for “hunger pang,” “once and a while” for “once in a while,” and “in route” for “en route.” Arguably, some shift in imagery occurs in these examples. But the new imagery doesn’t light any fires, ring any bells or bang any pots. For my part, I would prefer to say that these close-in-imagery switches are not honest eggcorns.

I googled “definition of eggcorn” and looked up all the definitions on the first page of results, and none of them included the stipulation that the imagery diverge noticeably from the misheard word or phrase at all. Neither does any definition I’ve seen here on our beloved Eggcorn Database/Forum.

So I’d have to say that your subjective preference for divergent imagery in eggcorns is simply that—your preference. Not that there’s anything at all wrong with your having that preference, but I’m resistant to letting that criterion become part of the eggcorn definition, because it adds another degree of subjectivity to a definition which is already pretty darn fuzzy. In other words, objective standards for what would constitute sufficiently divergent imagery to qualify something as an eggcorn are probably impossible. It would come down to each person’s subjective impression of whether the imagery was divergent enough to “light fires, ring bells, bang pots”. That’s a morass of subjectivity that can only make the definition of eggcorn fuzzier, and that would make the application of said definition to real-life examples more difficult.

Also, I don’t agree that some eggcorns’ being “weak” or less “interesting” devalues the very notion of eggcorns. Nearly every concept has less interesting or weaker examples, without devaluing the concept itself. Do weaker athletes devalue the notion of sports, or less interesting books devalue the notion of literature? Nay, I say!

So, while you’re certainly welcome to your preference for divergent imagery in eggcorns, I ain’t buying that as part of the definition.

Dixon

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#9 2008-11-26 01:00:30

patschwieterman
Administrator
From: California
Registered: 2005-10-25
Posts: 1680

Re: run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

Dixon—About the only aspect of the definition of “eggcorn” that most long-time forum regulars can agree on is that eggcorns require new imagery. That refinement in the definition of eggcorn is a product of this forum, so it’s unsurprising that you won’t find it on many high-profile definitions of “eggcorn”; most of the latter are based on very early posts on eggcorns on Language Log, and they generally don’t take later attempts to refine the definition into account. And they’re generally uninterested in the level of detail we’re obsessed with. You won’t have any trouble finding references to the “new-imagery requirement” here, however; searching for just the string “new imagery” brings up four whole pages of forum citations going back two years.

I’ve never seen a definition of eggcorn that was able to escape the charge of “subjectivity” (I don’t think one is possible), so impugning the new-imagery criterion on those grounds alone isn’t terribly helpful. Providing a list of widely-accepted eggcorns (say, things listed as eggcorns on Language Log, in the Database, and on sites like LanguageHat, where they know from eggcorns) that seem to break the rule would offer a far more powerful challenge to this idea that’s accepted by many on the forum.

As for the specifics of the current case, I more or less agree with Kem and David Tuggy. Chris’ enthusiastic endorsement is intriguing, but like Kem I’m not sure I understand it. I’m so far unconvinced that the of/off switch is very meaningful. If it’s an eggcorn, it doesn’t seem like a terribly interesting eggcorn.

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#10 2008-11-26 08:24:13

Dixon Wragg
Eggcornista
From: Cotati, California
Registered: 2008-07-04
Posts: 1375

Re: run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

Well, as I get clearer on what you folks are saying, it seems that I actually agree with you and, in fact, have been using that criterion all along in my own decisions re: what’s an eggcorn and what isn’t. I think maybe what confused me is the rejection by some of examples like “pain” for “pang”, and “off” for “of” (even though they aren’t etymologically related). I see now that the disagreements are quantitative (re: degree of divergence from the original term’s imagery) rather than being based on different criteria entirely.

Dixon

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#11 2008-11-26 09:38:35

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2714
Website

Re: run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

I think there may be two issues here. One is, as you say, the degree of divergence of the imagery, and changes like of<>off or in<>on<>and often do not make striking changes. I have maintained, and am still convinced, that minor lexical and “grammatical” changes, as well as major lexical changes, inevitably involve changes of imagery (that is what they are for ), but they are usually subtle, so they don’t make for striking eggcorns.

Another issue is that an eggcorn is a persistent mistake: the perpetrator says a non-standard form thinking it is the standard form. If someone always says “run off the mill” and thinks that is the way it is always said, then that is eggcornish. But if the person sometimes says one and sometimes the other, and can make sense of both, then you are not dealing with an eggcorn. For me most if not all of the pain/pang examples fit there. I know what pain means and I know what pang means, and I can talk about birth pains or birth pangs, or hunger pains or hunger pangs, and not be confusing one for the other. At that point it is a matter of vocabulary choice, not of an error of any sort, much less an eggcorn.


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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#12 2008-11-27 00:06:10

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

Re: run-of-the-mill >> run-off-the-mill

In the summer I tried to develop a possible decision scenario that someone who accepted the criteria we are using on this forum might use to evaluate an eggcorn. The “imagery” issue is dealt with in steps 5 and 6, TRANSFER and DISCOVERY (original post at http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2798)

About the same time David provided us with an inspired diagram of the eggcorn event (see http://www.sil.org/~tuggyd/ForFun/Eggco … DTuggy.gif). The issue of new imagery is covered by the two double-arrowed dashed lines that connect the acorn on the left and its eggcorn on the right.

Interestingly, neither of these quasi-formal analyses would keep “run off the mill” from being an eggcorn. In fact, if you take these analyses as providing a set of criteria that is both sufficient and necessary, then “run off the mill” would have to be an eggcorn. But these are not last-word treatments. As the discussion proceeds on this forum we try to push the analysis further. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I think that all this talk is helping us to decide what is and what isn’t a real eggcorn. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays think that we are just trying to sort out good and bad eggcorns. On Sundays I think that the distinction between real/unreal and good/bad eggcorns is delusional. Welcome to the cuckoo’s nest.

Last edited by kem (2008-11-27 18:18:59)


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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