Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
What are you going to expire or something? You have a very short self life, sir. I don’t know if I want something that goes bad that quickly
Sesame oil has natural long self life and ensures that food prepared with it has longer self life too.
This helps in longer self-life of food unlike other high speed rotating appliances, where the heat generation affects the taste
Dektol is also know for it’s long self life and uniform development rate.
A good primary cell has almost negligible leakage rate resulting in a very long self-life.
According to the CIA, nations such as Iraq have tried to overcome the problem of sarin’s short self life in two ways:
There are a lot more of these out there.
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They are highly suspect of being simple omission typos, and where you find the correct spelling in the same file you can be reasonably certain they are. E.g.
Will Masterpack shorten self life in the retail case? Masterpack provides extra shelf life up front; however, it may shorten retail shelf life.
But in other cases you are left wondering.
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If self-life is standard for anybody in usages of this kind, it is probably an eggcorn. The meaning works pretty well: the item remains itself, retaining its essential properties and characteristics, during its self-life.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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There are so many hits on “long self life” that at least some of them have got to be genuine. I’m trying to extend my own expiry date by eating as many heavily preserved foods as possible. Butylated hydroxyanisole saves on vitamins and extends self life. If future generations see me still plugging away at this forum in 30-50 years, they’ll know it worked.
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Yes, I vote eggcorn on this one. “Self-life” is a reasonable replacement for “shelf-life.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Whatever it is, it’s entertaining, and I’d agree it sorta makes sense in some sideways kinda fashion.
I’m (predictably) a little more skeptical about its eggcornicity. As I’ve pointed out before, clear instances of one-letter omission typos can range into the thousands in rghits. The numbers here are impressive, but not big enough to convince me absolutely that we aren’t dealing almost completely with typos. Another thing that bothers me about this one is that I just haven’t had much luck finding sh>>s substitutions (or for that matter, s>>sh ones). I think that’s a fairly rare reshaping—which doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but I’d need some pretty solid evidence in this case.
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Apart from the likelihood of sh>>s>>sh substitutions in speech (which I wouldn’t suppose to be as rare as you seem to expect), there is the issue (/issyou) of remembering spellings. A lot of people probably know “shelf-life†mostly or even only as a written form, and a visual-mnemonic analog to an omission typo could easily produce this variant, prompting the semantic reshaping.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-05-29 15:11:02)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Apart from the likelihood of sh>>s>>sh substitutions in speech (which I wouldn’t suppose to be as rare as you seem to expect), there is the issue of remembering spellings.
I said nothing at all about such substitutions in speech in particular, and in fact I agree with you that they’re common—I hear s>>sh before consonant clusters pretty much every day. And that makes it all the more interesting that my attempts to find eggcorns based on sh>>s>>sh haven’t been very promising. There may be instances of those reshapings recorded on the forum or in the Database, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. But feel free to document counter-examples.
A lot of people probably know “shelf-life†mostly or even only as a written form, and a visual-mnemonic analog to an omission typo could easily produce this variant, prompting the semantic reshaping.
An interesting theory—but one I don’t find convincing as a plain assertion; how would you demonstrate this? And how do you draw convincing boundaries—couldn’t any reshaping be chalked up to “mental typos”? And personally, I associate “shelf-life” with speech; I often hear it on radio shows about political issues, where “shelf-life” is an informal but popular buzzword (“Gov. Schwarzenegger’s budgetary policies haven’t had long shelf-lives….”).
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-05-28 14:14:13)
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Fair points.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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burred wrote:
Butylated hydroxyanisole saves on vitamins and extends self life. If future generations see me still plugging away at this forum in 30-50 years, they’ll know it worked.
Should we all have an estimated expiration(/expiry) date stamped on our entries? Otherwise who will know it’s been 50 years?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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