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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The “After Deadline†blog by the New York Times editors found a slip that may count as an eggcorn. This text came across the editing desk:
It’s easy to make fun of Ryan Seacrest — for his ubiquity on the show business landscape, for his over-weaning ambition, for his role in unleashing the Kardashian clan.
The editors go on to comment:
“Over-weaning†might describe an overly aggressive effort to shift babies or young animals off mother’s milk. Here, we meant “overweening.†(Spell-check should have helped on this one, but I think the hyphen in the original confused it.)
Had they looked further, the editors would have found that the error is bread-and-butter common. Indeed, almost all of the thousands of examples found by a Google search for “overweaning†are substitutes for “overweening.â€
The substitution is no doubt motivated by the obscurity of “overweening.” The opacity of “overweening†stems in part from the progressive loss of the ancient AS “ween†verb. As the N-gram shows, the old word has reached a low plateau in recent decades. If not for sword and sorcery fiction, it would, I ween, have gone to ground.
But is the switch an eggcorn? Users of “overweaning†may be thinking about the maternal care dimension of “wean†rather than the more up-front (pardon the pun) sense of the termination of liquid care services. If so, “overweaning†could convey to its users a sense of s-mother love that wouldn’t be far from the meaning of “overween.â€
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I’m having trouble with this one. It’s hard to see the sense of weaning in the hits. Underweaning I might see, as in spoiled or coddled. Might it be that the perps, even those who add a hyphen, don’t know what weaning means?
BTW, thanks for this one – I didn’t have a good grasp of what weening and therefore overweening meant until your post induced me to look it up. I suspect an impoverished substitution is being made by overwhelming, which fits the grandiosity but loses the presumption and distorted self-image of overweening.
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