Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
We were eating, and talking about, the delicious (salty, stringy) Oaxaca cheese, which in Oaxaca itself is called quesillo (pronounced [ke’siyo], and literally translated, “little cheeseâ€.) Someone had just said something like “Sà mucha gente lo adora†‘Yes, lots of people love it,’ and several chimed in with expressions of agreement. My consuegro (my daughter’s father-in-law, the father of my son-in-law ―why don’t we have a good word for it in English?), had been a bit distracted and failed to join the chorus of agreements, so somebody turned to him and said “¿Y tú, Francisco?â€, i.e. ‘What about you, Frank?’
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He shook his head and replied, _¿Que si yo? SÃ, claro, me gusta._ ― ‘Whether I [love it]? Yes, certainly, I like it.’ The question phrase is pronounced [ke si ‘yo], and with a tiny emphasis shift but the same rising intonational pattern, could also be “Oaxaca cheese?†Almost everybody at the table burst out laughing. Francisco insisted it was totally inadvertent, that he had only meant to say “You’re asking about me?â€, not “You’re asking about Oaxaca cheese?â€
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Anyhow, it’s eggcorn-like in that the two sound almost identical, both fit the context, and the perpetrator meant only one and was unaware that others might be expecting, or at least likely to perceive, the other. It is, unfortunately, not adaptable to enough contexts that it could become established as a standard mistake for anybody, so it is not an eggcorn.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2020-10-16 09:04:45)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Dunno. Could be an eggcorn. I could see some company branding their cheese “quesillo” to take advantage of both meanings (“little cheese” and “do I [like it”).
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Haven’t we usually discounted puns to the point of discarding them?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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True. I wasn’t thinking of the company’s pun as being the eggcorn. I was thinking of the phrase being eggcorninsh and therefore being picked up by the company.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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That is the genesis of a lot of puns, I think. At least in my family.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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