Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
As in
“Science has reinforced the folk law”
which I spotted in an excellent book called “The Secret Life of Trees” by Colin Tudge which I would recommend to anyone, eggcorns notwithstanding. I think it fits the definition of an eggcorn because it involves a reinterpretation of the original expression, strengthening something that people might have thought to be true (lore) to something that whose truth they would insist on (law).
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One question remains: is this user of “folk law” aware of the term ‘folklore’? If so this might be among many uses of ‘folklaw’/’folk law’ as a sort of play on words.
Consider for instance a hypothetical superstition that might attribute bad luck to a ‘folk law’ that requires some punishment or atonement for certain behaviours.
I found another item that uses ‘folklaw’ several times without looking like wordplay. The events aren’t related to any rules or the enforcement of any result or response.
“When working and / or staying away I tend to pick up small local publications on the folklaw of the area that I am staying in. Certain themes seem to be pretty universal (in a UK wide way), such as spectoral hounds or Devils hounds which seem to pop up in folklaw all over the counties, spectres by the roadside also seem to pop up a lot – Dartmoors Hairy Hands is quite strange though, which is a pair of hairy hands which appear on your steering wheel and take over control of the steering!
I was wondering if anyone on the forum had any local folklaw from where they live?”
click for source
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Hmmm
I don’t think that Colin Tudge was making a play on words. Still I suppose that if enough people use folk law as a proper word then it becomes an alternative spelling rather than an eggcorn.
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Here’s another sighting from the wild, hyphenated this time:
“I have no idea where I learned this trick – it seems to be in the folk-law of VM designâ€
— http://armstrongonsoftware.blogspot.com … esign.htmlOffline
A number of dialects of English neutralize the final -aw and -ore sounds (some pronounce both as -aw, others both as -ore or as occupying overlapping ranges in between). For those dialects this would be a hidden, or at most a stealth, eggcorn. It is also probably a mondegreen: at some point a speaker probably pronounced it right and understood it in the standard way, but a hearer, also hearing it right or nearly right, analyzed it with different imagery.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-07-16 14:30:21)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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