Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
We’re not talking about what you see in a kitchen and bath cabinet store.
(In an email I sent to someone earlier this morning, I generated an eggcorn from “eggcorn”: I wrote “egghorn.” I wonder what an egg horn looks like. ;-)
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Welcome to the Forum, Celad.
The spelling with white space, counter example, is in fact the standard spelling, I believe. The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following entry.
counter, a. Acting in opposition; lying or tending in the opposite direction; having an opposite tendency, to the opposite effect; opposed, opposite: cf. senses of COUNTER- prefix.
OED does not include counterexample, but it does include counter-argument (note the hyphen).
counter-argument An argument on the opposite side, or against anything
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I based my judgment on the Google difference in count (admittedly a risky thing to do ;-) between space and no space, not hyphenated. Also, I’m on the west side of the pond in the lower 48 and my old (1985!) American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, has all the “counters” – about 50 of them, I only played counter once – listed with no hyphen nor white space, including “counterexample.” “Counterargument” was not one of them. (And the Google Toolbar SpellCheck didn’t flag either just now. That has to be the final authority, don’t you think? ;-)
Last edited by Celad (2009-07-08 15:20:41)
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