Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Merriam-Webster’s online site has added eggcorns to one of their video snippets. This segment is voiced by Senior Editor Emily Brewster.
Unfortunately, the video version makes the mistake of confusing one of the mechanisms by which eggcorns enter language with eggcorns themselves. Mishearing is only one source of eggcorns. Eyecorns, for example, are overlooked, as are false etymologies. This is a mistake, oddly enough, that the M-W definition, does not make.
Conflating the mechanism with the result also overlooks the social dimension of eggcorns—a person’s one-off mishearing of an actual expression and substituting for it a plausible phrase does not make it an eggcorn. The mistake has to enter the lexicon and become the speech habit of a subset of language speakers. Like a virus, transmission is part of its nature.
Last edited by kem (2020-08-20 11:56:28)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Agreed – I’m glad you’re keeping track of this stuff.
For my part, I begin to detect within myself some proprietary instincts and feel unreasonably irked when liveried companies arrive with experts and JCBs, flags a-waving, and set to work next to me and my little shovel.
Last edited by Peter Forster (2020-08-20 09:54:17)
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Agree. The little Whig inside won’t be quiet.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Yeah, when “eggcorn” finally went mainstream a few years ago, I started shying away from reading articles about the word because too many of them got the basics wrong; it was painful.
Peter, have you ever published a memoir or fiction or anything like that? I always enjoy your snippets so much that I think I’d love to read something longer.
(Kem of course is a published author and I’ve read a number of things by him. And Mushrooms of British Columbia is on its way!)
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The mushroom book is indeed on its way. A few more months. Just doing the last proofing now.
This was a venture a bit out of my usual writing orbit-I had to consult over 500 journal articles over the three years that I worked on it. I’m trying to recover now by reading lots of novels and poetry. Eggcorns are less nutritious than mushrooms, but they are a lot more fun!
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Pat – you’re much too kind, or someone’s slipped something they shouldn’t into your drink. The circles I’ve moved in have not only not been literary ones, most have been barely literate. I doubt it would have made much difference.
I have seedling sonnets frozen forever at the fourth line, partial melodies, snatches of song and stacks of paintings poised and panting for completion. I paint in wax, so it’s no problem to melt off the surface and begin again. Bucketfuls of scraped off wax reproachfully defy re-employment. Perhaps I could corner whatever market there may be in dead-painting candles. There is much to be said for a complete snippet.
No, Kem’s your man; erudite and industrious, he has brilliant ideas on baking bread, wrote a poem that made my eyes leak and has the energy and fortitude to engage on intimate terms with over 350 mushrooms from only one part of the planet. After half a century of careful scrutiny I will fearlessly consume only a half-dozen or so.
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Knowledge does not always trump caution when it comes to mushrooms. There is a case on record of a professional mycologist (and I’m not one) who died from mushroom poisoning.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Peter—Your seedling sonnets are two lines longer than most of mine.
And a couple of years down the line, I note that 79% of the 120 (!) reviews of Mushrooms of British Columbia on Amazon are five stars. Wow!
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Thanks for noticing, Pat. Mushrooms of BC was the BC bestseller for the first year after it was published (they stop including sales rankings after the first year).
Still waiting for a movie contract…
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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