Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I think this is an eggcorn in phrases like “absorbent rate” and “absorbent prices.” These rates and prices might suck up any excess money in the consumer’s pocket.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/ … plies?c=10
The best thing for them to do is stay independent and sell oil to us at absorbent prices.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15351
Xibt just finished it’s review of the new Nvidia’s but fails to mention the absorbent prices of the current cards.
http://www.marlinowners.com/forums/inde … ic=44569.0
I refuse to pay absorbent prices and I refuse to be swindled.
http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/04/01 … re-piracy/
These “products” provided to us serve one purpose, to generate money at an absorbent rate but after storage and bandwidth costs are recouped, the developer paid and profits made, who exactly are we stealing from and what?”
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Welcome to the forum, rowsdower. A great start. “Absorbent/exorbitant” is a classic eggcorn. You have even taken the trouble to follow our informal protocols of presentation.
When I was typing the above paragraph I wrote “exhorbitant” instead of “exorbitant.” That’s odd, I thought. Why did I spell it that way? Exorbitant comes from Latin ex + orbis, so there’s no etymological justification for the added “h.” A little research shows, however, that I’m not alone in this mistake. I checked the COCA and BNS databases and found that even in edited texts the “h” spelling occurs at 1% of the frequency of the correct spelling. The OED gives “exhorbitant” as a low-frequency alternative.
My guess would be that the many “exh-” words-exhaust, exhume, exhort-are exercising some kind of influence. Perhaps “exhorbitant” also borrows from “abhorrent.” See, for example, how often people use the phrase “abhorrent price” and “abhorrent prices” (http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22abhorrent+prices%22 and http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22abhorrent+price%22).
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I’d say “absorbent” is a really interesting substitution/(?)flounder. But I couldn’t call this a classic eggcorn—there’s a reasonably big difference in sound between exorbitant and absorbent, and there seems to be an across-the-board substitution of absorbent for exorbitant, without the classic bipartite structure.
“Absorbitant” might have a better shot at true eggcorn status—and it gets a surprising 388 unique hits at the moment.
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there’s a reasonably big difference in sound between exorbitant and absorbent
When faced with alien sounds, the aural net is wonderfully creative.
without the classic bipartite structure
I’d disagree with you, if I knew what you meant.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Eggcorns are bipartite, at least compared to their eggcorns. (David Tuggy and Arnold Zwicky have both talked about this.) If the acorn was a single word, the eggcorn either splits the acorn into a substituted part and a remainder (“single-yoked eggcorns”), or it turns the acorn into a compound with two substituted constituents (“double-yolked eggcorns”). (Yes, there are instances that don’t fit neatly into this schematic—“absorbitant” may be one of them.) If the acorn is a fixed phrase of two words or more, the eggcorn replaces one of the two components—but that substitution should work only in the fixed phrase or phrases very closely related to it. In any case, in classic eggcorns, parts are always replaced—either a part of a word, or a part of a fixed phrase. Unlike classic eggcorns, flounders replace wholes with wholes. And that’s what’s happening here—“absorbent” seems able to replace “exorbitant” anywhere the latter is normally used. Interesting and entertaining, but not a classic eggcorn in my book—and probably not an eggcorn at all in the eyes of Tuggy and Zwicky, if I understand their views.
Kem also wrote:
When faced with alien sounds, the aural net is wonderfully creative.
Well, okay, but if the aural net gets too creative, it leaves eggcornicity behind.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-08-08 01:52:33)
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The leap from “exorbitant” to “absorbent” looks doable to me. But if you find it difficult, consider that many people pronounce “exorbitant” as “exorbant” (See this Google search.). “Exorbant” was common in the midwestern U.S. speech that I was born into.
Ah, I see. “Bipartite” is your tag for the substance of that earlier discussion. I am a reluctant convert to the belief that true eggcorns occur in canned expressions, you may recall. It is an idea that, as the pundit says, works well in practice but not in theory. Every lexeme in a language is semantically and phonetically embedded in language matrices of varying sizes that affect its usage. For a few very common words, the matrix is as big as the language. For a few words the matrix is so restricted that the word has no meaning outside of a tight idiom that contains it (The poor Rubicon that we are always crossing isn’t even a river any more). Most words, of course, fall between these extremes. To insist on some kind of restricted embedding as a indelible feature of eggcorns can be misleading, in my opinion. The prominence of tight idiomatic contexts in our discussions of eggcorns is partly a function of the way we notice eggcorns and the way we search for examples of them on the web. Still, your “bipartite structure” (a nice coinage for this feature, by the way) is useful canon, and we will continue to employ it.
Having said that, I’m not sure that the “exorbitant/absorbent” switch breaks the rule. The only interchanges of these two words that I have seen occur in the context of prices, costs, expenses, fees, amounts, taxes. “Exorbitant” is one of those words that, in modern English at least, almost always occurs in restricted (i.e., idiomatic) semantic contexts. A quick following-word context check in COCA shows that at least 95% of the 487 examples of “exorbitant” have this semantic frame. We know that “absorbent” will replace “exorbitant” inside of this idiom. To be considered a flounder, “absorbent” would have to be a polyvalent (i.e., a relatively idiom-free) replacement for “exorbitant,” and I’m not sure it is. The evidence is devilishly hard to check, though, because we have so few modern examples of “exorbitant” that occur outside of the monetary frame.
Last edited by kem (2009-08-11 17:52:36)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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