Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I was listening to a funeral service that was being simultaneously translated into Spanish from English. A speaker quoted the phrase about pain being God’s megaphone through which he speaks to us in ways we cannot ignore, and the translator rendered it as pain being God’s microphone. I actually think it was a pretty good translation.
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Most Spanish speakers in the audience (and a fair proportion of the English speakers) probably had little idea of what a megaphone was/is like. We rarely amplify people’s voices acoustically any more, and the normal way to speak loudly is to speak into a microphone so the voice can be electronically amplified.
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Its always interesting, of course, when opposites (mega- and micro- in this case) wind up, through the vagaries of language change, being effectively synonymous.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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A suitable observation for the beginning of Lent.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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