Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
“He’s already bunkering down and getting ready for a long fight,†said Jonathan Vaughters, a friend of Landis’s who rode with him and Armstrong on the United States Postal Service team.
Lansis clearly does not know if he wants to hunker down or get to a bunker.
Found in the wild in the NYTimes August 5, 2006.
Also, no comment about the doubly possessive “Landis’s”.
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Google claims that Ken Lakritz submitted this one some time in the past, but I can’t pull up his original post..I did manage to pull up a classic Language Log post by Arnold Zwicky that discusses “bunker down”—and many other eggcorns. Even just the “bunker” part is too long to reproduce, but here’s the pointer to the post:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 01419.html
I’m with you on the possessive s—I like the streamlined look. But plenty of mainstream style manuals are ranged against us. The 6th edition of the MLA Handbook (2003) gives “Venus’s,” “Descartes’s,” “Dickens’s,” and “Marx’s” as examples of proper punctuation (p. 91).
I don’t own a copy of the NYT stylebook (if I ever have an income…), but I’m willing to bet that that fussy possessive is in line with NYT house style.
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