Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Classroom activities on and ongoing basis are important to an anti-bullying program.
good enough to invest in, in any given economic climate – and then follow it on and ongoing basis – is more than most people are wlling to commit to.
Someone has to choose the Easter novelties, and sample and report back on and ongoing basis the quality of the cakes.
About 8k ghits.
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The an/and malapropism is very common and can arise in numerous ways. Here there is doubtless blending with the extremely common phrase “on and on†involved as well. In fact it can easily be thought of as a syntactic rearrangement of going on and on . If one were to say on an on-and-on-going basis it would be a rather different kind of funny here, and maybe this is a kind of haplology from that (on-an-on-and > on-and).
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But part of me thinks it very likely that (a) this is standard for some, and (b) that for them the phrase “on-and-on(-going)†is perceived as a component, despite the fact that this renders the rest of the phrase less than fully coherent (how does the basis tie in syntactically? as a displaced anarthrous object of one of the on s?). If so this is eggcornish.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-06-01 17:41:25)
*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 think David’s analysis is correct: a special case of and << an influenced by going on and on.
As to how utterers reckon the syntax, it may be a syntactic haplology with an on doing double duty, or a preposition elided. I think it’s equally likely, though, that the whole unit simply gets remaindered to the idiom pile, so to speak, with no attempt to parse the syntax. That is, on and ongoing basis is treated as an idiom with either an adverbial or adjectival function. Classroom activities on and ongoing basis is understood as equivalent to regular classroom activities; report back on and ongoing basis equals report back regularly.
Basis is not only a chomeur, it’s sans abri.
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