Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Seeing this quite a lot on fora and blogs, using gleam in place of glean in terms of gathering information, facts, impressions.
Googling “you can gleam” rather “gleam from” (since that could be “the gleam from the streetlight”: 431,000 hits.
First page s full of obvious examples:
You can gleam the most incredible insights…
The World’s Famous Direct Mail Marketing Piece (or So They Say) & What You Can Gleam From It…
Usefully, you can gleam knowledge from in-game books…
Sometimes you can gleam the amount of work a client will require…
While at first it might appear to be just a typo of adjacent letters, or a malaproppism for a much more common word, I think there is an element here of “shedding light on matters” or “a glimmer of understanding”. It seems to be imply the knowledge gained is not obvious and spelled out but rather hinted at like a gleam of light rather than a glare.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into it.
What do you think?
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will buy a ridiculous hat – Scott Adams (author of Dilbert)
Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a day; set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life – Terry Pratchett
http://blog.meteorit.co.uk
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Well, it works for me but sometimes that doesn’t mean much. Successful gleaning requires a keen eye which can detect every gleam, glint, glimmer, glisten and glare of glittering grains or their metaphorical extensions. Sorry about that – I was suddenly reminded of a running discussion between David Tuggy and Kem about elements like ‘gl’ as some of them began tumbling from my fingertips.
Gleam/glean seems to have had a mention before, but it appears to be tucked into some fold of the forum’s earlier history so I can’t conjure it up.
And congratulations on your elevation to Eggcornistahood, Adam – now there are two of us on the wrong continent to meet in the clubhouse and exchange passwords and secret signs.
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I fear I may be the one serving the drinks at the clubhouse to the real members – my 51 posts to your 550 looks pretty poultry ;-)
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will buy a ridiculous hat – Scott Adams (author of Dilbert)
Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a day; set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life – Terry Pratchett
http://blog.meteorit.co.uk
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A gleaming new Eggcornista! An IT guy warped from years in Dilbert space should fit in well.
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Synchronicity strikes again. Just yesterday I had noted:
Apparently for some time she had gleamed from their frequent conversations that he was concealing something from her.
and written it down as a possible eggcorn: also a possible blend of gleaning and catching a glimmering.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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It’s too many years later to be synchronicity, but I’ll resurrect this glimmering glamourie to share the example I found this evening in an online article :
...I’m not incredibly well-educated on every nook and cranny of these people’s private lives, but what I’ve been able to gleam has been far from shocking.
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