Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Another of those substitutions that more or less inverts the intended meaning. Common:
Vegetables, yogurts, breads, and fish give a variation of the much taunted Mediterranean diet.
turkey-travel.suite101.com › ... › Turkey Travel
The much taunted “Emory Study” claimed 47.5% ‘reduced risk of falling’ : : for a group of about 70 seniors learning Tai Chi over a 15 week period.
frank.mtsu.edu/~jpurcell/Taichi/wwwboard/messages/2174.html
The Confederate batteries on the much taunted high hill were finding Union firing was enfilading their position…
www.members.cox.net/rayhbanks/Pages362-367.html
In a statement sent to GMANews.TV, ATM said the much-taunted super-cycle of mineral prices has gone bust.
www.imaginet-blogs.com/mining/?cat=99
The times are changing fast: it’s been a short 12 years since architects PEI Cobb Fried & Partners designed the much-taunted Main Branch …
sf.curbed.com/tags/library
It becomes reasonable to assume and assert that, the much taunted gains of Beijing conference during the hey days of Better life days was more of a cosmetic …
www.nigerdeltacongress.com/.../women_li … erment.htm
India is shining,claims our government – through an ad campaign aimed at generating the much taunted “feel good factor.â€
www.etstrategicmarketing.com/Smmarch-april04/fore.html
Jan 20, 2010 … The much taunted healthcare reform, although survived thanks to the last-minute unity of democrats, reached his desk in much reduced shape.
www.ecocn.org/bbs/viewthread.php?action … ble&tid…
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I thought this might be a FLOUNDER, but the words aren’t semantically similar.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 04805.html
(excerpt below).
2. Flounders. More things that aren’t eggcorns. Back in May, Michael Quinion and I had an exchange about
DO NOT USE THE ESCALATOR IN THE ADVENT OF FIRE
(an example contributed to Michael’s World Wide Words newsletter), with advent for event. I said at that time (May 24):
I’m inclined to see it as a simple confusion of phonologically and semantically similar words, like flaunt/flout, militate/mitigate, flounder/founder, etc. (Incidentally, it would be nice to have a technical term for these confusions. Let me suggest FLOUNDERS.)
[In fact, Geoff Pullum has just posted about the flounder flaunt/flout. (Try saying “the flounder flaunt/flout” three times fast.)]
Flounders are the counterpart of ordinary classical malapropisms (“ordinary” here means: not of the eggcorn subtype). In both flounders and—let me continue this frenzy of naming with yet another term—PINEAPPLES (“He is the very pineapple [pinnacle] of politeness”, from Mrs. Malaprop herself), an incorrect word E is substituted for a phonologically similar word T, but in flounders, the error word E and the target word T also overlap semantically, while in most pineapples E and T are semantically distant (if E is an existing word at all). Obviously, there’s some room here for borderline cases.
Last edited by jorkel (2010-01-26 18:17:06)
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I think your initial reaction was right, or at least not far wrong, Joe. There’s actually quite a lot of semantic material in common between taunt and tout ; both are transitive verbs designating kinds of purposeful speech designed to call the attention of and evoke a strong emotional reaction from the addressee. I don’t doubt at all, that those similarities, besides the phonological similarities, help motivate the substitution (either direction).
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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