Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
These excellent little implements help remove lice from hair and have already had several mentions on this forum. In some dialects tooth and tough are homophones and the resulting ‘fine tough comb’ seems quite eggcornish to me – these combs need to be strong and durable to fulfill their function. Curiously, all examples are metaphoric – evidence of a lice-free younger generation?
You need some luck with the cards AND you really have to read/analyze/scour your results with a fine tough comb. Display posts from previous: ...
forums.sportingnews.com/viewtopic.php?t=162452
If anyeay, try really hard to get your SATs up at least by 100 points or more. Take a review course or go over past SATs with a fine tough comb. ...
talk.collegeconfidential.com/.../157622-think-i-can-get-real.html
I find it hard to believe that the way CSI went over the car with a fine tough comb that there could be that many hairs overlooked. But that’s JMO …
boards.insessiontrials.com/showthread.php?p=12949176
In Oz and the UK lice or, more accurately, their eggs, are known as ‘nits’ and a FTC as a nit comb. There are a lot of ‘knit comb’ hits but, sadly, I can find no eggcornish interpretation:
i am going to try a knit comb for the eggs in his mane, but am stuck on how to get them off his legs ive tried using a dull knife, but its just gliding on …
www.horsetrace.com/db/forums/index.php?showtopic… – Cached
You then throughly run a knit comb through the hair, wiping the excess conditioner off and squashing any lice you find. With cockroaches I take delight in …
www2b.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/.../topic1887029.shtm – Cached
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Where they are homophonous, how do people pronounce them? [tuƟ] and [təf] are not very similar for a lot of us, though of course with the stress on “fine†and “comb†the differences can easily be swallowed.
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Somewhat related: [go over it] tooth and comb, with a fine toothcomb, with a sharp-toothed comb, with a fine-tuned comb, with tooth and nail, with a toothpick.
*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 people who pronounce tooth as “tuth”, which is “tuf” from the mouths of lazy-tongued people.
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Does that mean they say [təƟ]? Does it have the same vowel sound as “tusk†[tÉ™sk]? Is “tuf†as you spell it pronounced like “tuffâ€, i.e. to rhyme with “enough†or does it rhyme with “aloof†or what? English spelling is such a pain when you’re trying to talk about pronunciations.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I was explaining how some people come to pronounce “tooth” the same way as “tough”. Not only do they use the vowel sound of “tough” (which isn’t a shwa, it’s a short u), they pronounce the th as f. Hey presto, tooth=tough.
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OK … but the vowel sound of “tough†is pretty darned close to a schwa (central mid unrounded vowel) for me, and that is the only pronunciation described in the dictionary I just consulted. Is the “short u†sound you refer to the sound of “cudâ€, of “couldâ€, of “cooedâ€, or what? Those are (in my pronunciation) [kÉ™d], [kÊŠd], [kud], in the International Phonetic Alphabet. (I suppose “long u†might be [ju] as in “cued†[kjud].)
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The “th†to “f†switch isn’t a problem: I too have heard people say “toof†for “toothâ€. In baby-talk “toofies†is quite standard (though “teefies†also occurs).
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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By short u, I mean the IPA upside-down v. (In some words e.g. could, put, and in some dialects that don’t differentiate, it’s the IPA upside-down omega.) I find the idea that tough, tusk and cud are pronounced with a shwa quite odd. Which dictionary are you using? The entries at Dictionary.com and Wiktionary only give short u.
Cooed and cued contain (different) long-u sounds.
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Well, I guess the dialects of IPA are stronger than I knew! The pronunciation given for schwa (upside-down e) at http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/c … IPAlab.htm is close to what I expected and to what I pronounce for tough, tusk and cud. The one at http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/ is very different and may conform more to your notions of the standard.
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The Concise OED on my desk did not have a pronunciation for tough —“pronunciations are not given for ordinary, everyday words†I now read in the Introduction. It does give cut as having [ʌ], as opposed to giving the first vowel in ago as [ə]. For me and millions of other Americans those are the same vowel, with a slight difference in tenseness attributable to the presence or absence of stress.) The online American Heritage (which I then checked) gave [ŭ] (the breve should be over the u, though my browser is messing up on it), which its pronunciation guide identified as the vowel of cut, which I have always thought (and been taught) is a schwa.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-10-08 07:43:44)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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