Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
From a chat-list: “Then, of course Ms. Terry just had to bring the whole state of Israel into the fro.” This was in the context of a contentious discussion, and it seems pretty clear that the writer meant “fray” instead of “fro”. It’s very unlikely to be simply a misspelling, especially considering the distance from the “a” to the “o” on the keyboard. On the other hand, I’d say that “fro” doesn’t sound enough like “fray” to be a mishearing, thus it probably doesn’t qualify as an eggcorn, even though there could be a meaning connection, the “to and fro” of a contentious debate being a kind of “fray”.
Dixon
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The fray, whether physical or conversational, is by its nature kind of a back-and-forth thing, and often when you bring something into the fray you are putting it into play , which again for me has up-and-down, back-and-forth imagery. A blendish association with to-and-fro sounds right to me.
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Meaning connections are of course not limited to eggcorns (they are necessary but not sufficient conditions): blends are rife with them. Which makes sense. As Lewis Carroll explained, blends come about most naturally when you are hesitating between two closely related meanings and have “that rarest of gifts: a perfectly balanced mind.â€
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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