Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
On Mar 24, 2009, I read the following in a thread on ADS-L
I’m more than hoppy-horse interested …
and responded:
>
> “hoppy-horse”: Do we have a new eggcorn?
There are about 123k hits on google for “hoppy horse,” including a fair proportion of false matches and a brand name. Arnold Zwicky, with his usual insight and attention to detail, commented as follows:
apparently so. you can find some traditional hobby horses offered for
sale (e.g. on Craigslist) under the name “hoppy horse”.
but things are more complicated than that. there are at least two non-
traditional play objects available under the name “hoppy horse”:
1. a piece of playground equipment made by Steelcraft. it bounces
(i.e. “hops”) on a sturdy steel spring. in addition to hoppy horses,
the company also offers a hoppy pony, hoppy racehorse, hoppy duck,
hoppy chipmunk, hoppy turtle, and hoppy frog.
2. an inflatable toy horse—one tradename is the Rody Hoppy Horse—that can be used in hoppy horseracing (there are some cute photos and
film clips).
the complexity is that the names for 1 and 2 might have arisen from a
reshaping of “hobby horse” (that is, as an eggcorn) or through a
deliberate play on words. or one on some occasions, the other on
others. but once you have hoppy horses, the way is open for hoppy
ducks and the like.
<end of quote>
Herb Stahlke
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Thanks for the nice submission Herb. This one was actually mentioned in the forum previously by our very own administrator Pat Schwieterman. I think Pat will be happy for your validation of his (and your) find.
“hoppy horse” for “hobby horse” by patschwieterman Contribute! 5 2007-04-06 09:07:47 by patschwieterman
I can never figure out how to activate the links, so you can always run a website search of hoppy using the “Search” option on the red menu bar at the top of the page.
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The hoppy horse discussion from 2007 is here: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1618
It also covers the topic of voiced and unvoiced consonants substituting for each other, and I think this was the first post in which we realized that some people were consistently getting very different Google readings from others.
Zwicky’s discussion is useful because it examines the problem of brand names—which I didn’t look at.
Joe, you’ve mentioned the problem of getting links to work before. So what happens? You copy and paste the URL for an earlier post into your own post, but the link is “dead” once you’ve submitted the post to the forum?
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-03-28 14:20:20)
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Yes Pat, that is correct. After running the search, I highlight one line, then copy and paste it to the post. The link reaches the post D.O.A.
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Joe—I’m a bit puzzled; what you’re doing should work fine. Are you composing directly into the posting window on the forum, or are you composing in a word-processing document and then copying and pasting into a forum window? I’m one of those weirdos who still uses Wordperfect, and I’ve very infrequently had problems with the transference of links from a WP doc (though not on this site, as far as I can recall).
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Perhaps Joe is saying that he is taking a line from the eggcorn forum search results and pasting it into the post. Like this:
“hoppy horse” for “hobby horse” by patschwieterman 2007-04-06 22:07:47 by patschwieterman
This paste doesn’t transfer hotlinks, just the hotlinked text.
This forum, built with PunBB, accepts a limited range of user tags. But it does detect URLs, and it automatically turns them into hotlinks. So if I type http://cnn.com, the stuff between “http” and ”.com” becomes hotlinked text. But you probably knew that.
There is a second way to do hotlinked text in posts to this forum. You put the text you want to be hotlinked between quotation marks, follow it immediately by a colon, and follow the colon with the URL. This link (i.e., the phrase “This link” in this sentence) is hotlinked to the current thread because I typed quotation,”This link”,quotation,colon,”http etc.” with no intervening spaces.
In an earlier post Pat pointed us to a Textism page that shows many of the markups that work in this forum. The page is at http://textism.com/tools/textile/index.php. I have found it helpful. The “Textile” link at the bottom of the editing screen leads to this page of instructions: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/help.php#bbcode
Last edited by kem (2009-03-29 11:00:29)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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