Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2011-03-08
This is a new one: A friend of mine left me a voice mail in which she urged me to join her in publicly expressing “distaint” for a local politician. That word was not found in any of the scores of dictionaries accessed by the OneLook site, though the Urban Dictionary has it as a synonym for “hate”. In context, my friend clearly meant “disdain”. It seems quite eggcornish, with the very similar pronunciation and the meaning connection through such possible unconscious intermediaries as “taint” and “stain”. But careful perusal of 100 of the 820 Google hits for “distaint” yielded no clear eggcornish examples; most of the hits were simply misspellings of “distant”. However, the Urban Dictionary citation indicates that my friend isn’t the only one to use this term. So, I guess it’s an eggcorn, but a rare one. Have any of you ever seen/heard this one?
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Think you’ve got a live one, Dixon. You can find many more examples by searching for distaint for: Almost all of these hits are substitutions for “disdain for.”
David T has discussed distain << disdain on the Forum.
Last edited by kem (2013-01-21 15:23:39)
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Distain is extremely common. The addition of a taint is indeed an interesting and potentially eggcornish difference.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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