Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I hesitate to post this in the eggcorn section; it might better go in slips, or in the thread on “read, understood, but mispronounced.” Yet there is some possibility of a fruitful misreading in it. The 2017 Massey Lectures are currently being rebroadcast on CBC. They’re great listening. In the most recent, the distinguished lecturer (whose first language is not English) was describing modern societal ills. Here is the excerpt.
His pronunciation suggests that he reads severing as severe-ing. Treating the limbs severely, indeed. I had to check to make sure that sever and severe are not cognates. They’re not. The first is related to separate, and the second to serious, tough. Misreading of severed might thus be an occult eggcorn, only revealed by pronunciation.
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I suspect you are right—”sever” is probably a stealth-eggcorn of “severe” for many English speakers.
It is possible that the speaker really does know the differnce between “sever” and “severe” and was moved to pronounce “sever” as “se-VERE” by English’s tendency to shift the stress to the ultima on many verbs (PRO-ject, pro-JECT, etc. The tendency is called “initial stress derivation.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-s … rived_noun for definition and examples).
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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