Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
It is rare that an active meme can be traced to its point of origin. The word “serependic” is loose in the wild, roaming the scientific literature, specifically related to the problem of setting a value on undisturbed nature. I came across it today; it is being used to mean “legacy value”, or the unknown potential of undiscovered biological species, or undiscovered ecosystem qualities, to provide benefits to future generations. The trail can be followed to an article by Swift et al., in 2004, in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment:
High levels of biodiversity in managed landscapes are more likely to be maintained for reasons of intrinsic, serependic (‘option’ or ‘bequest’) values or utilitarian (‘direct use’) than for functional or ecosystem service values.
http://moderncms.ecosystemmarketplace.c … system.pdf
It looks to be a blend of serendipity and pend. Serendipity, after all, is named for the three princes of Serendip, who “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
For posterity, the number of distinct googlable hits today is about 10.
Last edited by David Bird (2011-02-03 20:22:02)
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Possibly “pend.” But “serependity” is an astoundingly common misspelling of “serendipity.” You drop the “n” and switch the “p” and “d” and…and…. Well, the ear obviously hears a path between the two words that orthography doesn’t suggest.
Here’s a 2002 instance that may be a de novo coining. And Google Books documents in a 1956 Library Admin guidebook. All of the other instances seem to come from agriculture/ecology science sources.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Yes, I agree that it’s unlikely to be a blend. It looks like a simpler word has been formed out of a difficult one. I like two things about it: its apparent credibility, and the interesting structure it’s taken, as a new dish served up by the brain’s chef short-order cook out of scraps from the lexeme pantry, but also as an inversion mutation of the word’s genetic code.
Last edited by David Bird (2011-02-03 20:44:14)
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A mutation indeed. The descriptivist in me is awed by the complexity and novelty of this new life. The prescriptivist in me hopes that someone will strangle this Damien in its crib.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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kem wrote:
...”serependity” is an astoundingly common misspelling of “serendipity.”
Yeah, it looks to me like someone misspelled/mispronounced “serendipity” as “serependity”, then used the ”-ic” suffix to adjectivize it. Thus “serependic” equals “serendipitous”. The meaning connection is clearly there in the agriculture/ecology citations but, because “serependic” is a neologism, not a pre-existing word, I guess you couldn’t call it an eggcorn, right?
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I guess you couldn’t call it an eggcorn, right?
Hmm. Eggcorn is not a word either.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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kem wrote:
Eggcorn is not a word either.
Okay, but it’s made up of two readily recognized words which together create an image with a clear meaning connection to the base word “acorn”. In fact, it was originally a two word phrase (“egg corn”), so not really even a neologism until combined by Geoffrey Pullum. That’s different from something like “serependic”. It’s not that I’m against calling a neologism like “serependic” an eggcorn; I just thought that it doesn’t satisfy the definition. Am I wrong about that? As it says on the Eggcorn Database “About” page: “The criteria of how to identify eggcorns have also been clarified…The crucial element is that the new form makes sense: for anyone except lexicographers or other people trained in etymology, more sense than the original form in many cases.” “Eggcorn” for “acorn” makes sense. “Serependic” for “serendipitous” doesn’t; it’s just an adjectivization of a reshaping based on misspelling/mishearing the base word. Or so it seems to me.
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To ‘make sense’ doesn’t always mean that the eggcorn is a dictionary word. If you look at the 21 terms that received multiple nods at our 2010 end-of-the-year wrap up (listed toward the end of this thread) you will see that almost half of the eggcorns are innocent of lexicographical attention. So “serependic” is not disqualified because we don’t find it (yet) in dictionaries. Whether, though, there is semantic motivation behind its creation (i.e., it “makes sense”) is what I think we have been discussing in this thread. If David is right about “pend,” then we have an eggcorn squash. If “pend” or some other word besides “serendipic” plays no role in “serependity,” then we are probably looking at an ear typo, not an eggcorn.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Oh, I don’t know… I suppose one might posit serependic in a scientific journal in order to convey sufficient expertise through expert-ese …
sere = a series of ecological communities that succeed one another in development.
pendic = well, pending?
Besides, serendipity strikes me as one of those hackneyed words that a high school school student uses in a college admissions essay to look smart … only to get laughed at a few years later for using in an actual college essay. Not the sort of word an alleged scholar would either want to use nor want to get wrong.
Any resemblence of sere-pendic to another word is simply … er … shall we say, regrettable?
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I thought about “sere” when I first read David’s post. But it doesn’t really fit with the purported meaning (option, bequest) as well as “serendipity.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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