Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Wedgwood and Atkinson (1872) assigned the origin of staple to the same Germanic roots that gave us “stab” and “steeple”. Initially, a staple was just a single skewer to hold things together, until the stapler was introduced in the 1950s. Stable, on the other hand, comes from the Latin word for “stand”. It’s a natural transition from “staple” together to “stable” together, in the sense of keeping objects organized forcefully, or stabilizing them. Granted, these may be inadvertent errors. There is no sense of stabling together, as if for livestock. After watching more closely my own typos, thinkos and assorted WTF errors over the past few months, I’ve come to see how amazingly loose is the connection between intention and action in the act of committing words to screen. Caveat eggtor.
Kids activities:
If you manage to make afew good ones you can glue or stable them together to make a streamer that you can hang over a door,
(http://www.helium.com/items/838014-kids … ntines-day)
Army study guide:
Something like that will work and then type up what you want to elaborate on in a word document and stable them together.
(http://community.armystudyguide.com/gro … 4021097092)
Hip-hop forum:
Do me a favor, draw a bunch of pictures, with dialogue bubbles – showing me what happened. and either fax them over, or stable them together and mail it to me.
(http://forums.projectcovo.com/showthread.php?t=1789181)
A catalogue of mistakes guaranteed to lead to a poor report and poor marks:
Assignment not properly stabled together (pages on backside coming off)
(http://www.boeingconsult.com/tafe/gener … -write.htm)
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Caveat eggtor! Love it. Now we have a motto that we can use as a secret password to enter the clubhouse.
You’ll also find the malaprop going in the other direction. Several examples out there of “horse staple” in place of “horse stable.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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The voicing of stops before – le (q.v.) is noteworthy and relevant here. Given drip/dribble, sniff/snivel (& sniffle ), hop/hobble , and so forth, stab/stap > stable might seem, a priori, to be more likely than staple . However, there are pairs like grab/grapple as well, where the voicing seems to go backwards. Some bizarre stuff in there.
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Yup, look out behind you, Egg-Tor.
*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 just ran into this in another form, as ‘dietary stables’, those foundational things that just don’t change.
the daily Great American dietary stables of meat, potatoes and coffee
https://www.facebook.com/BioSolaceVibra … 1581551914
Whoops, this one was entered in Pat’s extraordinary list of 34 eggcornish also-rans from 2006.
Last edited by David Bird (2014-01-19 14:35:10)
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