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Chris -- 2018-04-11
This is astonishingly common- over 2 million ghits. Anybody got a theory why? Examples:
His output never failing to push the envelope, his voice never settling into a fixed dialect, he is the Rubric’s Cube of his art.
www.centerformie.org/home.php
Anyone ever flirt with ‘Rubric’s Cube?’ that thing is like, impossible!
www.nonduality.com/hl1149.htm
And indeed, the infamous Rubric’s Cube is the incarnation of evil, for those who have struggled with it.
www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discu … oloth.html
UFO sighting…It looked like a very rusty Rubric’s Cube with plenty of vertical streaking and no windows of protruding details.
www.mysticaluniverse.com/ufos_aliens/uf … ralia.html
Maybe it has something to do with a Rubric’s cube, but then, what would an obscure toy from the ‘80s have to do with writing? It’s all tres confusing…
www.thesunnews.com/news/columnists/celi … 35655.html
At first our graphical representation of the framework looked a bit like a Rubric’s Cube (Figure. 1).
www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~afeldman/ActionResearchPapers/RearickFeldman1999.PDF
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In the last half year or so, readings in the hundreds of thousands or even millions for reshapings that I’ve never seen or heard anywhere have become oddly common—I’ve now seen dozens that have had me scratching my head. I don’t believe them, and I have no idea what it means.
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The utterers may have heard the word “rubric”, but the context suggests that they don’t know what it means. This is probably just a malapropism.
Last edited by jorkel (2009-03-03 16:19:13)
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I may be influenced on this from Spanish usage, but I somehow have in my mind as one of the meanings of “rubric†a (handwritten) sign in a book, prototypically resembling a “hash mark†or tic-tac-toe grid, with vertical lines criss-crossing horizontal ones. Each face of the rubrics cube has such a pattern on it. (I don’t find anything in a quick dictionary check to support this meaning, however.)
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In a way this is an anti-Annie: Rubik is a proper name, but does not sound like a reasonable English name, so the pressure is on to link it up to some word (any word) that sounds reasonably like it.
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The phonological difference between Rubik and rubric can be attributed to a common kind of phonological process: spreading rhotacization, if you like.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-03-03 17:23:20)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Something wrong with the ghits number for “rubric’s cube.” Yahoo Search, which also gives an estimation of total pages, suggests 3K pages for the phrase. The Yahoo hit numbers usually differ from the Google numbers, of course, but they tend to be in the same order of magnitude.
I also note that the ghit totals for “rubik’s cube” and “rubric’s cube” are the same (2700K). Which makes me suspicious.
Still, it is a common misspelling, by any measure.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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