Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I was impressed with this guy’s skateboarding man hoovers
Ali was a tad overexcited as there were some army chaps on man hoovers
If getting to no.1 depends on man hoovers like this so Sony can’t lose
Moving around, carefully avoiding the furniture? Cleaning-up operations?
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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Hoover is a pretty nearly obsolete word, isn’t it? Or is it still commonly used somewhere in the English speaking world?
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I have a hard time construing this one eggcornishly. Which doesn’t mean nobody else is doing so.
*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’m going to commit heresy now.
So why the split into two real words? For the writer, the rationale might be that the first bit is obviously ‘man’ so what to do with /oover/? I mean, the writer has made an alternative ‘sense’ of a word, even in a ‘nonsense’ combination of known words; It’s not just bad spelling. The person who creates ‘man hoover’ has come up with a creative solution to the problem of what that sound ‘means’, using real words. That’s assuming that ‘hoover’ is in his/her lexicon, of course.
It’s not unlike ‘furthermore’ or ‘nevertheless’: we use them constantly without needing clear semantic justifications for them.
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Right, but we have generally been slow to assign the accolade of eggcornhood to those word identifications that don’t make sense. If I think it includes a particular similar-sounding word, but that word doesn’t make sense in the contexts of usage, it’s not a good eggcorn, or maybe not an eggcorn at all. E.g. “I led the pigeons to the flagâ€, though it identifies novel words for the sounds of pledge allegiance , and although it has been claimed to have been standard for some, is not a good eggcorn because leading pigeons has little or nothing to do with the usage of the phrase. (It may be all the more entertaining for that, but that’s another matter.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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David’s argument captures my own feelings quite eloquently, so I don’t feel the need to rehearse the issues he addresses.
We’re a site that’s focused on collecting examples of eggcorns, so things that fulfil the definition of “eggcorn” well become the ideal. That’s not a problem to me, but it means that some really interesting finds don’t manage to fit the criteria of eggcornicity. And as a result, people sometimes feel we should stretch the definition of “eggcorn” a bit in order to encompass such stuff. But I think the meaning of eggcorn is too well established to change now. And I also think that something doesn’t have to attain the “eggcorn” label in order to be worthy of interest.
And “man hoovers” is certainly worthy. What a cool find! I would never have thought to go looking for it, and I can’t believe that anyone would ever use it in an unselfconscious, non-punning way, but some of the instances sure do look authentic, boy howdy. Absolutely not an eggcorn in my book, but an astonishing reanalysis that kinda bobbles my mind.
My favorite online instance was clearly a pun, however. An article in a NZ paper on a symphony auditioning vacuum cleaner “players” was entitled “Orchestral Man Hoovers in the Dark” (here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment … d=10609305). For those who aren’t aficionados of 1980s synthpop, Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark (aka OMD) were one of the best of the movement—personally I’d say their Architecture & Morality album (1981) was probably the finest album the genre produced, with only Thomas Dolby’s debut offering anything in the way of competition. But we’ll see what Dixon has to say about all that….
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It was a stretch to use the ‘Contribute’ section for this. After all, it’s exactly what ‘Slips, innovations and reshapings’ is for.
Last edited by JuanTwoThree (2010-10-31 13:05:11)
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