Eggcorn Forum

There is something about this that is like a blend within a blend (a double-blend?).

In terms of surface form, you have tip of the iceberg plus maybe tipping point or tipping the scales, yet neither of those cliches / idioms seem to contribute to the meaning.

In terms of meaning, the examples seem to suggest “scratching the surface,” which I think is fairly similar to seeing the “tip of the iceberg.”

Perhaps the tipping idioms don’t come into it at all. Maybe it’s just the -ing from scratching the surface that shifts the nominal tip of the iceberg to an action/activity sense?

There seems to be some game called Clubpenguin where the objective, or one of them, is to tip the iceberg and it may be that for some game-playing people, ‘tipping the iceberg’ is a clear and obvious idiomatic expression. There’s also a puzzling number of ‘tip the iceberg’ ghits where the sense is clearly ‘tip of the iceberg’ and having just inveigled a few folk into using the expression I find that my tiny sample all use ‘tip o’ the iceberg’ which I suppose could be heard as ‘tip the iceberg’:

But the two projects, both under construction and expected to open late next year, may be only the tip the iceberg. Developers are showing an interest in …

The inflationary effects of malpractice litigations are real; The multi-million dollars verdicts are the tip the iceberg; Defensive medicine is a more …

For those that miss the ‘of’, tipping the iceberg may simply mean noticing that tip, becoming aware of it?
Before I peter (sick) out completely I must note that, with reference to the recent ‘petty Annie’ post, there are a couple of hits for ‘Tipper the Iceberg!’
Oh, and fearlessly facing what it may mean to tip, 10 years ago there was a novel then a TV series on lesbian love called, ‘Tipping the Velvet’, which apparently was a slang Victorian term for cunnilingus.

I mentioned in another recent post (on Handcock ) the pronunciation sumpthing as likely arising from a phonological transition phenomenon, specifically a failure to precisely coordinate two different articulatory changes. There a transition from m to th ([ÆŸ]) is pronounced and thus perceived as having a bilabial stop between bilabial and dental consonants.
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The loss of of in tip’vthe iceberg may well be similar, though kind of backwards. Here you start with a transition from a bilabial past a schwa to a (voiced) labiodental to a dental. If you reduce the schwa till of consists of just its final v sound (which we regularly do with of like we do with have ), you get a p-v-th sequence.
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This will easily sound like a p-th transition in which you loosen up the p just a little early (concomitantly jumpstarting the intended voicing by the resultant drop in oral pressure), before the tongue is quite in place for the th ([ð]). If it is heard so, it will sound like the intended target was “tip the iceberg” rather than “tip of the iceberg”.
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This would be mondegrenous (in the wider definition of that term); the hearer perceiving a structure that the speaker did not intend and did not really pronounce. To the extent that “tip the iceberg” makes sense, and different sense than “tip of the iceberg”, it would be eggcornish. But it is not a very good or clear example of one.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-12-19 16:49:13)

OK, I know what you mean. But what we think is simple often turns out when you analyze it closely, to not be so simple.
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Ever try to think what it takes to chew? Think about how badly you can bite your tongue when it is only slightly swollen, or if your teeth get changed just a bit from what your mouth is used to, how you move your tongue to move the food around to chew, how close it constantly comes to your teeth without getting bitten—and pretty much all unconsciously done.
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The articulatory movements of speech are at least as complex. The fact that you can describe something as simply as “chew your food” or “drop a little word out” doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of complexity there.
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But, I was thinking of these as spoken language. Yes, if they are typing omissions, that is certainly a different matter; i.e. different (and likely lesser) complexities are involved. And you are probably right that these are errors that the perps would recognize as such, so not worth trying as hard to understand as if they were standard.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-12-20 00:13:35)

I once took a semester-long course on the pathways by which nutrients pass through the walls of plant cells. No one’s needed to lecture me on the complexity of apparently simple processes ever since. But nevertheless, when a financial reporter writing a newspaper article leaves out “of” in “the tip of the iceberg,” I think figuring out what most likely happened is pretty simple. And I doubt it has anything to do with drops in oral pressure.

I don’t think I’m being merely flip here. In the last year or so, we seem to have developed a tendency to favor razzle-dazzle over likelihood when trying to explain the phenomena we come across.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-12-20 01:39:51)

Another example similar to “tip the iceberg”:

Top the morning to you all,. I am helping out a co−worker with a Oracle issue.

Well Top the Morning to you ALL

Only those two exx. googled up.