Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Interm is visually very like both intern and interim ; if there is the least fuzziness in the wrong part of the screen, or in the writing, rm, rin, rim, rn are all very similar. Interm can be easily found on the internet with either meaning. Intern :
[worked] as an interm in EDP (Electronic data Processing). I worked for 10 years and for me was an oustanding place to grow, learn and work.
he worked as an interm in his father’s lab.
his first position was an interm in small animal medicine at Bristol vet school. This was followed by a residency in small animal soft tissue
(Specializations are fun: imagine being a resident in small animal soft tissue. Sounds like you’re a tick or something.)
He graduated from Harvard Medical School a year ago, and is an interm in Boston now.
Intermship (Former Employee) – Goshen, NY – August 6, 2012. learned different areas of the hospital enviornmwent as part of an Intermship …
( enviornmwent is cute: it has some of the same visual ambiguities as the rm/rin/rn/rin combinations, with a stray w as well [which also in many styles of writing consists only of short verticals linked by curves]; note also that most people do not say the r and o in the order traditionally spelt in environment .)
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Interim :
Interm Jobs, Employment Indeed […] The ability to obtain and maintain an interm Top Secret Clearance.
What is an interm clearance? ? Jan 28, 2018 — What is an interm clearance? ... interim clearance is when the agency/office/security personnel grants you a provisional clearance for access.
Offers a 45 day placement to students who are in need of an interm alternative assessment
I am using an interm measure in Filter funtion which is not giving me desired result
NON-TEMPEST 60HZ ARE ACCEPTABLE AS AN INTERM MEASURE ONLY AS. THEY WOULD BE INSTALLED ADJACENT TO THE COMPUTER ROOM IN A. SHIELDED AREA
An internship is understood to be a step towards full licensing or approbation to work independently at a job. In other words, it is an interim position. How much of the confusion is due to the visual typography (topography?) problem or other spelling error (e.g. n and m are adjacent on the qwerty keyboard and in the alphabet too; i can be easily omitted or overlooked), and how much might be eggcornish in this way I can only guess. A perp confession would be nice.
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Actual malapropisms of intern < interim are out there but it is not always easy to tell. Here are some possible examples:
Working as an Interim? Generally, an interim leader should expect to be accountable for achieving deliverables set by the hospital
i was workinng full time during my one year interimship will it be a problem if i provide my experiece letter
Comment 26 Page 30, line 4 reads “an intern measure, it will be only a matter”. The line should read – “an interim measure,.
Theory of Flight PRELIM Flashcards ¶
An intern measure which has not met all requirement for initial certification but still can be operated for special purpose. Provisional.
The intern measures to be follow by police officials aim to reinforce the rule of law and the trust of the citizens in the authorities.
And so forth. The very difficulty of being sure one meaning was intended and not the other increases the plausibility of the eggcornish understanding of things.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2023-08-14 13:37:50)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I can see how intern/interim could substitute for each other in an eggcornish manner though this seems much less likely for non-rhotic speakers.
No need for a fuzzy screen or poorly hand-written lettering either – for many years my eye or rather my brain has insisted on bridging the tiny gap between an r closely followed by an n, rn. And I’m not alone:
I always get Burns night and Bums night, or Burns Unit or Bums unit at the hospital confused.
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My weak eyes have the same problem with m’s and rn’s—and others. This kind of thing gets even worse in medieval manuscripts—to the point that there’s a name for it among paleographers: “minim confusion.” A minim is a short vertical downstroke, and in many medieval hands it was hard to tell letters like i’s, u’s, n’s, and m’s apart when scribes were writing quickly and scrunching things together in order to save expensive parchment. So it can be hard to tell whether you’re seeing “uu” or “ini” or some such thing.
In older English orthography, medieval scribes sometimes marked long vowels with doubling; that’s why we still use “oo” or “ee” today for what were historically long vowels. It’s thought scribes didn’t use doubling as much to mark long i’s and u’s because of the potential for minim confusion. I’m not sure, however, why we don’t use double a’s, since the potential for misreading seems much lower there.
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I never knew that! Thanks for the enlightenment. How cool that “minim” (even in the etymological form minimum) consists entirely of letters at least minimally involved in the confusion. Is the plural minima?
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Wikipedia gives a wonderful example (you can see the manuscript form there): “A 13th-century example of this is: mimi numinum niuium minimi munium nimium uini muniminum imminui uiui minimum uolunt (“the smallest mimes of the gods of snow do not wish at all in their life that the great duty of the defences of the wine be diminished”). In Gothic script this would look almost like a series of single strokes (this problem eventually led to a dotted i and separate letters j and v).”
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By all means let us dutifully increase rather than decrease the defences of the wine. (As you might think, its influences might help one write such a thing. How many of the valued items in our collections owe their existence in some measure to it?)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2023-06-24 11:04:29)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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