Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
jorkel wrote (on the “well-warmed†thread):
I can’t tell if the concensus here points to an eggcorn or a simple malapropism.
You’d also apparently used it in a couple of previous posts on this site, Joe, so I presume it is standard for you. I know it is quite common (1¼M ghits vs. 41.8M for “consensusâ€), and is on Paul Brians’ list, but it apparently has not been discussed in its own right on the site.
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I’m sure it is standard for many. It makes perfect sense (cense ?) to me. The idea would be that a virtual (mental) poll (= census) is taken at some point in the process of discussion and most if not all are found to have come together (= con-) in agreement regarding the issue. The standard analysis would presumably be that most if not all have come together in their sense of what is the case or what should be done.
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Of course for many people the spelling difference between ce and se is pretty much arbitrary and many who might spell it sensus (or senses —19K ghits— or other variants) might well be thinking census. It somehow seems less likely to me (though I am not sure why) that those who spell it census might be thinking of the root sense.
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Conceivably the root of incense, censer and the rare word cense may be involved, for some, but it doesn’t seem very likely to me. Nor does the root of censor, censorious seem likely to be involved.
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It’s a nice example of the kind of eggcorn that involves no phonological difference at all but only an orthographical one.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-05-14 17:23:54)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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There are various words that I consistently misspell no matter how many times I see them. Consensus is one of them; It just never looks right, so it never gets committed to memory long enough before I have to use it again. It gets spelled as “concensus” because it does look like “con + census”. Perhaps if I looked at it as “consents + us” I might have a working mnemonic. But, the sense of the former pair can be quite appealing, so I’ll probably recall the wrong mnemonic.
Here’s another mnemonic that caused me all sorts of trouble for a while: I decided that I would remember how to spell guard by noting that it rhymed with hard/ lard/ bard etc. But I later misapplied that mnemonic to gauge by saying that is rhymed with rage/ page/ stage etc. and convinced myself of the wrong spelling: guage. (Then, of course, there’s the word guarantee which always looks a bit funny starting out with guar.)
Another word I consistently misspell is license … seems that licence looks more correct, but when it comes time to writing one or the other, I can never recall which is correct.
Last edited by jorkel (2009-05-14 21:13:47)
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On license/licence, at least, both are standard (though the latter may be an Americanism?). MW10 gives the following:
license or licence n
...
license also licence vt
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