Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Drug eluting coronary stents are a big businesss. ‘Elute’ is just exotic enough a word to trigger the search for a familiar near-homonym. This seems common although Google emits one of its ridiculously inflated estimates, so who knows? Examples:
Use of stents began in 1994 and is now routine. Newer stents, called drug-eluding stents, are coated with drugs that help prevent reclogging.
www.webmd.com/heart-disease/news/200411 … t-survival
This is a randomized, multi-site, clinical trial comparing percutaneous coronary stenting (PCI) with drug eluding stents to coronary bypass ...
clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00326196
Turns out Cordis made the drug-eluding stents that most likely saved my life.
www.suddenlysenior.com/heartattack.html
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‘Elute’ is plenty exotic for me – I’d never heard the word. (It seems to be plenty exotic for my spellchecker, too, since it is currently marked as a misspelling. Stent is also so marked, but I do know that one.)
According to the dictionaries I consulted, to elute is “to purify by washing” or “to extract with a solvent”. Both Google and Wikipedia suggest that the bare form is used in chromatography, presumably in the “extract” sense, while eight of the first ten Google hits for the gerund eluting are for drug-eluting stents. (The other two are links to dictionary definitions of elute.) I assume that it is the artery and not the drugs that are eluted (in the sense of “purify” or keep clean)?
Anyway, if many patients and their families had never heard the word eluting before being treated with a drug-eluting stent, they would naturally search their lexicon for some likely word they had heard of that might make sense in the phrase, as Ken says.
Given the syntactic structure of the compound, “drug ??-ing stent” would seem to be a stent that does something to/with drugs. In that case, exuding would be a likely candidate (a stent that exudes, or releases, drugs). But eluding sounds much closer to eluting, and since both are fairly low-frequency it’s no trick at all to reach for the nearer phonological match. Which is a long way of saying that I think the semantics of exude get mixed up in there somehow.
Eggcorn, I say.
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