Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
A coworker just said (in an instant messenger chat), “man, just had a cool in-prompt-to brainstorm session…”. I immediately thought that it makes sense, given that the brainstorm session was presumably prompted by something.
Is it an eggcorn?
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I’d say yes. This is a difficult one that straddles lots of borders, a four-corner problem. None of the wiser heads are stepping up, so fools like me feel the urge to rush in. In-prompt-to is unquestionably eggcornish in spirit. The elements are a bit twisted to fit the shape of impromptu in a way that’s not entirely logical, and that confuses the issue.
Impromptu is a nearly unscannable word. It contains a bit of both senses of prompt, as incite and originally, ready. The usual sources don’t agree on its etymology – does it mean in readiness or unprepared? That difficulty is due to the polyvalence of the prefixes in- and im-. It was used to describe witty comments, but did it mean she had a ready, spontaneous wit, or she had her wit ready, i.e. rehearsed? Prompt is already present in impromptu, and though the sense it holds there is not completely clear, it may suggest a trigger as implied by your coworker. The final to is clearly eggcornish, and the overall sense of “prompted by”, mixed with “in response to”, is clearly playing a role.
So I’m edging my bet. Welcome to the forum, Keith.
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The traditional definitions exhibit some of this ambivalence. I first encountered the word (I think) in music, where an impromptu is “a musical composition suggesting improvisationâ€. If it is really improvised off-the-spur-of-the-moment (or on-the-seat-of-your-pants, or on top of your bat or whatever), then it is unrehearsed, unplanned, etc. But surely even Schubert and Chopin couldn’t come up with such sublime music without at least some thinking about it beforehand …
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-12-01 16:46:34)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Impromptu is the sort of word that people are very likely to misinterpret the first time they hear it. I recall thinking that the word was “impromptive” in seventh grade because the “u” ending seemed unlike anything I had heard before.
I like the reshaping “In-prompt-to” because it indeed carries the imagery that burred mentioned: a mix of “prompted by” and “in response to.” I’d classify that as an eggcorn.
Last edited by jorkel (2010-12-02 18:43:59)
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