Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
The ‘quick’ of quicksand has the old sense of ‘living’ or ‘alive’ whereas its eggcorn, more accurately perhaps, reinterprets this as quake.
This material when wet and trampled upon begins to quake; it is therefore often called quakesand. If after having reached a condition where it quakes^ it is …
The thin ice that I’m threading on right now might just break if I did, and I’d probably sink deeper and deeper each day, like quake sand, it’s a sucky …
Grit leadership hopeful Gerard Kennedy has been earnestly staking out the anti-war ground on Afghanistan. Alas, he is putting his pegs down in quakesand. ...
... they went through mud and were stuck, the mud turned out to be quake sand Dionicio heard them scream and ran as fast as he could to help them, ...
(The additional eggcorn in the second example is, sadly, already in the Database.)
Another similar though less convincing possibility is ‘earthquick’ for ‘earthquake’ – ‘quick’ could mean sudden or brief or, less likely but more apt, the above sense of alive.
ave you Faced any devastating earth quick in your life? email this … was not to scary. but i have faced a devastating earthquick in my life 15 years ago. ...
Earth quick in Nabire Papua. Periodic Flood and landslide in Sumatra, ... Suddenly an earth quick of 9 Richter scale following by tsunami hit Aceh in 26 …
10 Oct 2005 … I fell the earth quick at 08:52am in my school.we (students)fell the earth quick atleast one min and 30 seconds.the earth quick mostly …
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That first example of quakesand is, in my opinion, a clear eggcorn; I make this determination thanks to the perpetrator’s helpful elaboration of the imagery: “a condition where it quakes”.
The examples of earth quick are less clear, but it’s a plausible eggcorn. I have a feeling that these were probably written by second-language English speakers (Asian place names in the second; fell for felt in the third; small details like the capital letter on Faced and the somewhat non-conversational “i have faced a devastating earthquick in my life” in the first). Do you have any data on the provenance of these examples (sources, URLs, etc.)?
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I be gobsmacked at the number of instances of “earthquick” (tens of thousands of ghits). Many of them are, to be sure, from speakers for whom English is a second language. But not all. This eggcorn feels like the real deal, Neil.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Yes, it is rare but gratifying to find eggcorners justifying their eggcornish usage – this is only the second one I’ve encountered and I’d almost given up on finding another.
I added ‘earthquick’ as a further example of quick/quake confusion – but flowing the opposite way – just for the sake of completeness, for I had noticed that most if not all usage seemed to be that of non-native speakers. I wonder whether we have reached some sort of tacit agreement that eggcorns from such sources are invalid, less valid, or require a category of their own; those learning another language are keen to make connections for the relatively few familiar elements they possess, whereas most native speakers rarely seek etymological links because their language-landscape is self-evident, well-lit, and usually requires no justification.
There aren’t that many ughits – 592 – and I can’t be sure after a superficial skim that any of them are by native speakers but I did come across one example that brought to mind quick-the-noun – that sensitive flesh just under the finger or toenail:
Everyone knows by now that tsunami is generated by earth’s quick. Whenever there is an earth quick, there will be potential tsunami somewhere. ...
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