Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
119,000 hits on Google. Not quite an eggcorn, as this is a bit of morphological regularization rather than semantic reanalysis. But I’m sure the people who say “fully blown” don’t have in mind the sense of a flower in full bloom which is, I think the root of the idiom. Which brings me to the real point of this post:
Inside all of us hip descriptivists, isn’t there a cranky prescriptivist struggling to get out? The belief that all adverbs must end in “ly” drives me crazy. In fact, I think “fully blown” bothers me not because it violates any rule, but because I love English idioms—all the things we say just because we say them and always have. In this sense, I think a lot of bad writing is bad not because it violates the rules of English grammar and usage, but because it is not idiomatic—it turns its back on the pithiest, clearest, most traditional ways of expressing a thought, either because (a) the writer doesn’t know them; or (b) the writer finds them lacking in dignity—i.e., insufficiently pretentious. The second of these explains the “style” of the New York Times, I think. I’ve always supposed that the editors of NYT know what good writing is, and they hate it.
Comments, listers?
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Chris uses the Textile text generator; it interprets dashes on both sides of a word or phrase as meaning that you want to show the passage as having been scored out. I think you can get rid of the scoring by putting spaces on either side of the dashes.
This site gives a brief rundown of Textile commands: http://textism.com/tools/textile/
They’re on the right-hand side of the screen; clicking on a particular command will bring up examples on the left.
I think pretentiousness is part of it, but there are other factors, too. I was always taught in school that you should say “speak quickly” rather than “speak fast.” Nothing wrong with “fast”—it’s a “flat” adverb without an -ly and has been around since the early 13th century at least. But if you get corrected often enough, you start internalizing the so-called rules.
I hope the NYT doesn’t use “fully blown.”
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Thanks Pat. Your explanation is perfect.
I fixed the faulty formatting.
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