Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I want to second the suggestion made by someone back in October 2005—I’m surprised that it’s not in the database already, as it’s been one of the most common and annoying (to me at least) eggcorns that I’ve seen on the Internet. It’s usually used in Usenet or on a message board, as a flamewar starts up, and one poster accuses the other of writing “dribble”.
Here’s a website that points out the error:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/dribble.html
and a couple of websites which (unless they are being ironic) seem to make the error:
“Random Dribble” http://greenlip.org.uk/cgi-bin/leonardo.py/
and a site which refers to its “Political Dribble” http://tinadupuy.com/wp/?cat=2
and here’s a couple of Usenet postings which clearly are:
http://tinyurl.com/owukj
http://tinyurl.com/olwhv
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I’ll add my vote for this as well; I was going to start a new topic but there are already four open on this:
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=644 (this topic, 2006-08-09)
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1021 (2006-09-22 by eggcornista Peter Forster)
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1187 (2006-10-20 by taylje)
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1390 (2006-12-24 by Chris)
I’ve also found the following:
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … p?pid=2247 (2006-11-07 by eggcornista jorkel)
which lists dribble/drivel as “already in Eggcorn database or Forum index ”.
So what’s the process for official recognition?
For what it’s worth, this meets the conditions listed on the project page:
1) homophonic substitution – a mexican would have difficulty telling drivel and dribble apart.
2) makes sense – the image of a drooling idiot is powerfully evoked by the use of “dribble”
3) in actual usage – I saw it on Slashdot today:
(http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid= … d=18450421 (with accompanying grammar nazi commentary))
It’s got an entry in the Urban Dictionary:
(http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p … ess+Drivel)
Google shows 57,400 results for “mindless dribble” and 57,400 for “mindless dribble”; having 1/3 of the internet mindshare is nothing to sneeze at.
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I think everyone who’s posted on this is right—it looks like a good eggcorn to me, too. Something seems to have gone wrong with Zinho’s posting of Google numbers, so I ran them again; I got 129k ghits for “mindless drivel” and 60.5k for “mindless dribble.” Google numbers this big are only so meaningful—they include a gigantic degree of “noise”—but my figures show the eggcorn coming close to half the frequency of the original phrase.
I don’t know whether this has been considered and rejected by our gatekeepers, or whether it has just never made it that far. In any case, the pipeline between between the contribution page and the Database just isn’t functioning right now. The volunteer linguists who do that work are all academics, and we only hear from them after the end of the spring university semester. I’m hoping we can get things moving again fairly soon, and this is one I think should definitely be prioritized.
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