Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
This is an odd one. It is pretty clearly orthographically rather than phonologically based, and could well be taken as more a non-eggcorned malapropism, but anyway:
the two humans were immediately confronted by two silver war droids, each holding high powered blaster rifles aimed unnervingly in Kyle’s direction.
found Lance’s lobs perfectly placed as they attracted the middle of the Yorkshireman’s raquet, unnervingly aimed into the front corners.
In the first number of the London Mercury, Squire had taken unnerving aim at the young experimentalists,
a breeze block on the back of your head, thrown with grace and unnerving aim hits the mark every time.
an Me 109 was Destroyed and an F.W. 190 Badly Damaged; Lewis’s Aircraft Escaped Damage due to His Unnerving Aim and His Skilful Control
From scenes of high comedy to moments of pathos and lonliness, Austen’s creations are painted with unnerving accuracy.
Robinson’s characters are as contemporary as today’s teenagers, a group she depicts with particularly unnerving accuracy.
The same semantic plausibility that makes this eggcornish also makes it possible in at least some instances that it is a deliberate use of unnerving ; if two blasters are aimed in your direction, whether unerringly or not, it is likely to be unnerving. (It goes without saying that Kyle was not unnerved by them: rather he slashed the two droids’ heads off with his lightsaber or something before they could tighten their trigger fingers.)
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The standard collocation of “uncanny†with “aim†and “accuracy†may be involved somehow.
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To my surprise “unnerving accuracy†gets a thousand times as many ghits as “unnerving aimâ€, which gets about 60; unnervingly aimed and aimed unnervingly only get a couple each. “U. accuracy†seems to me to be the least prone, by its collocations, to set up the semantic plausibility one would expect to support the shift.
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The shift is suspect of involving what I think of as a “doublet switchâ€, where the gemination of a consonant gets transferred to the next consonant before or after. This is a rather comonnly observed kind of innacuracy or inacurracy, probably a kind of typo in most instances. Here, however, the v is also inserted (i.e. we are dealing with unnerving instead of unnering, though that also of course occurs, >1M ghits.) The doublet switching phenomenon ocurrs, clearly, on the reading as well as on the writing side of written English, and may help a person used to reading “unnering accuracy†think he or she has seen “unnerving†instead.
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The following look like examples of the round-tripper out there: unerring for unnerving :
wearily, trying to think of a way to distract myself from her unnering beauty.
Bill Tandy and his nine-year old daughter Elan experience an unnering adventure when a body is found near their building’s parkade
Here I don’t get any clear indication of anything eggcornish, i.e. no clear semantic motivation for the woman’s beauty or the finding of the body being unerring in any sense.
fwiw unerving also gets over a meg of ghits:
Unerving news from my doctor… – SheKnows Message Boards – [ Traducir esta página ] About 6 months ago, I went to my dermatologist and she found a “suspicious” mole on my back. I have lived with that type of thing my whole.
The (possible, certainly not certain) loss of the word “nerve†from “unnerving†and perhaps consequent invention of a new stem “erv(ing)†is eggcornish in certain ways.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-02-19 08:23:23)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Sorry, writing “in a hury†(i.e. furriously); I posted examples of unnering instead of unerring for the round-tripper. Doublet-switching myself after implicitly acussing others of doing it. Better:
I was so overcome by the unerring adventure, and the loss of my wife, that I flogged through the multi like forty-two ash-blonde,
The descent to the subterranean dungeons can be an unerring experience, fortunately for the camera flash, the area is lit up
Yesterday I had the unerring experience of trying to call the South African Airways (SAA) call centre to make a flight booking to Johannesburg.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I’m not sure I’d call “unnerving accuracy” either an eggcorn or a malapropism. The only thing that surprises me about it is that it gets only 2000+ raw hits. I’m convinced I’ve seen it a number of times in book reviews, and for me it has the feel of one of those bookreviewerly phrases—like, say, “sharply observed”—that get passed from person to person without a lot of hard thought. I suspect it’s almost always hyperbolic—I doubt few people honestly find accurate word-portraits truly inhuman and unnerving—but I’m not convinced it’s an error for “unerring” in your examples.
Google hits have gotten really weird recently. Books.google.com returns over 200 hits for “unnerving accuracy,”—which seems like a lot, given that it’s about 10 percent of the total hits. In any case, a lot of authors have written the phrase, and a lot of editors have given it the green light.
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