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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Found in the wild!
I don’t know whether an entire aphorism qualifies, though. First, a justification:
http://www.ielts-useful-tips.com/addin- … njury.html
A Google search returns what seem to me copious examples, and it is easy to understand the conflation of this usage with the notion of “rubbing salt in a wound”:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Add- … 7&bih=1175
Examples:
http://www.johnscreekcomputerrepairs.co … ation.html
“and to add in salt to injury, it can cause mere wastage of your precious time”
https://www.wattpad.com/216574016-my-li … gone-wrong
“To add in salt to injury, Candace yapped to mom about seeing me and Spencer kiss…”
http://www.pprune.org/pacific-general-a … -oz-3.html
“The engine failed at the worst possible time in the takeoff and to add in salt to injury was not an instant failure.”
This oddity is infecting IELTS testing, as evidenced by some of the search results, and it may have originated as a play on words used by writers on cuisine, but it seems to have achieved a degree of acceptance due to the conflation noted above.
Last edited by adambrower (2016-11-05 19:56:26)
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Nice find, Adam, curious and quite compelling, but that ‘add-in’ seems uncomfortably clumsy. “Adding salt to injury” would seem a likelier usage and as many English speakers would drop the ‘g’ from ‘adding’ the result would sound the same. Most examples of the latter variant seem to come from countries where English is not the mother tongue.
Until I was 22 I thought the phrase was “adding salt to injury.”
Adding the risk of fraud which is the subject matter of this article would be tantamount to adding salt to injury of a typical Nigerian entrepreneur ….
Last year’s appointment of Mr Okemo as chairman of Kenya Seed Company, a position he rejected, amounted to adding salt to injury.
Huge wage bills are tearing the Ghanaian economy apart and it will amount to adding salt to injury if organised labour goes ahead with its …
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Covered in an earlier post: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=4198
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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And here’s a verbal variation I encountered while researching a different eggcorn last night:
Abby insalted religion,politics,and big business.
record review
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Then to rub insult to the wound our steaks were overcooked
I’ll sign up just to rub insult to the wound
Geez, no need to rub insult to the wound
Three of the five or so examples of this switch-around.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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