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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Found in the wild on a Huffington Post reader comment section.
“People are insinuating that Obama will pay a heavy political price if BushCo is prosecuted. That is patiently false.”
I’m sure this should be “patently false”. I can’t envision a patient falsehood, so maybe on second thought this is just a typo, but there are several Google hits for “patiently false” used in place of patently false. Interestingly, all occurances of this eggcorn appear to be in political discussion sites. Weird.
Last edited by instarx (2009-07-11 19:59:05)
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“Patiently obvious” turned up last year (http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2528). It seemed to me (and others) to have some claim to be an eggcorn. “Patiently false” I’m not so sure about. What could “patiently” be doing to “false” that would make it more than a malapropism? Could the sense be “if you wait patiently, you will see that it is false?”
There are well over a hundred unique Google hits for “patiently false.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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