Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
From a daycare facility communicating an issue with time clocks:
“The softer ware balances on the time clock are still not accurate for the majority of parents. We are still working with the computer person to get this problem corrected.”
Again, potentially a typo, but considering it was also misused in the e-mail subject line, I think it’s legit…
Subject: Softer ware Balances
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It would be an odd finger-slip typo: tre on a qwerty keyboard would be slightly possible though still highly improbable, but ter ? Seems much more probable that the person somehow thought there was an extra syllable, and perhaps the comparative – er , in the word/phrase.
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For it to be a good eggcorn, there needs to be a good but unorthodox logic to it, something that lets it add up in an unexpected way to a total fits the contexts in which the word is used. I don’t get how softer ware fits in that way. What’s it softer than?
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There are a good many likely cases of harder ware (along with many clearly advertent or unexceptionable examples, e.g. talking about harder ceramics for tableware.) I have the same problem getting them to make sense.
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Still, my brain’s slow—maybe the rest of you see how they would work.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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