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Chris -- 2025-05-10
More than 700 “genuine” Google hits for “now defunked” where “now defunct” appears to be meant, for example
“This is a travelogue written by my wife for an old website of ours but that website is now defunked, so being eco-friendly I’ve decided to recycle it here.”
(www.facebook.com/ZoqyBlog)
“HD DVD is now defunked and blu ray has won , what do you think …”
(answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080227112159AA0JllK)
“The BBC are now defunked as an unbiased news source. It’s not what they report but what they don’t. And we pay for this BS!”
(identi.ca/empia)
“Even though the cold war is over, counterintelligence and spying are still high on the priority list of some secret groups of the now defunked KGB.”
(www.angelfire.com/ok/xpiredsoul/bios.html)
There are probably other expressions where “defunct” becomes “defunked”, but “now defunked” was just easy to search for. I’m guessing that this arose as an eggcorn because people expect an adjective beginning with “de-” to end in ”-ed”, not ”-t”, and they analyse the word unconsciously as “de-funked, something no longer funky = lively, as in ‘play that funky music’, something that has lost its funk or had its funk removed and is thus dead”.
Last edited by terrycollmann (2010-02-02 18:12:39)
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Subtle, but I like it.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I wonder if there’s any blendiferous influence from debunk(ed) ?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Being funky is not always good. It can also mean “old, worn out, smelly”. And de- in this case might be the “completely” prefix of decrappéd.
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