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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I’ve been looking at the mis-spelling of “throne” as “thrown”, which appears to be pretty common. I have trouble seeing an alternate imagery here, but I thought it was possible that the spelling is coming partly from an association with “crown”.
King Henry IV is known to have taken the crown and thrown by force.
Nobody every considered Google would lose the crown and thrown with a social network.
I am the sultan who took the crown and thrown of Hungary and granted them to a humble slave.
And of course, once one has a crown and thrown, the next step is to get an air…
Fanpop quiz: which of king henry VIII wives produced the next air to the thrown?
Jason was the hair to the thrown of Iolcus in Greece. His father was king Aeson
Last edited by fpberger (2010-11-02 19:14:24)
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I can attest that “thrown” for “throne” is pretty common in student papers. My students don’t write about “thrones” all that often, but when they do the word is most often misspelled. I’ve always attributed it to the likelihood that the homophonous “thrown” is the word they see more frequently, but your theory about “thrown” being reinforced by “crown” would help explain why this is so weirdly common.
And “air to the thrown” is almost poetic.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-11-03 08:54:20)
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See also gilibug’s entry. Otherwise, the association of crown and thrown here is evidence of one form of the WTF typo, where letters or letter combinations migrate about in the sentence, presumably through some sort of priming mechanism in the brain or the fingers.
Here are a few other cute malaprops (straining to be eggcorns) of the “air to the thrown” sort:
find the common sense to realize that accidents, including the heartache the flesh is air to, belong to the pattern
(http://www.jungandshamanism.com/page/page/4841824.htm)
Misquotable quotes:
To die, to sleep, no more! and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is air to.
(http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/36560)
Woodland management business plan:
An open air venue will be provided within the forest which may also be of educational value. NWMCWC has fallen air to the running of Dervaig Village Toilets and will ensure their continued availability for public use.
(http://www.nwmullwoodland.co.uk/documen … 20plan.pdf)
This last one may be WTF, primed by “open air”.
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Interesting explanation regarding “crown” and “thrown,” but the fact that these two words don’t rhyme works against that theory to some extent. Just wanted to toss that in.
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Joe—Why do you feel the lack of rhyme works against fp’s theory? That’s not clear to me.
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@Pat: If one is composing a sentence and writes “crown” and hears the word in his head, then when he reaches “thrown” he is liable to do a double-take because it doesn’t rhyme. Just a thought.
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It depends on how tightly and in what ways the orthographic and the phonological are tied together in one’s brain. They both are very complex. For instance, an aspect of the orthographic for many of us is the motor-tactile sequence of typing something on a qwerty keyboard. I can readily believe (I have seen myself do it!) that a person might thoughtlessly repeat the own wordfinal sequence (a kind of inverse to homeoteleuton, a persistence error), and his brain might confirm that yes, THROWN/θroʷn , even though it is pronounced non-rhymingly with crown , is in fact pronounced correctly for the intended meaning THRONE.
.
Not arguing either that the lack of rhyme would or that it wouldn’t lessen the probability of this error, just commenting that it is a very complex question. And, for certain I would say that the lack of rhyme does not make the error impossible. Which I think you said as well, Joe.
*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’ve experienced that effect with the typewriter keyboard as well, David. I’ve typed completely different words before without consciously knowing it, so that’s indeed a possibility. In fact, I find it to be very much pattern based, with the bias being toward commonly typed words.
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