Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
After announcing to my students that I had developed a rubric for grading their essays and distributing it in the form of a grid, I received the following in one student’s reflection on his writing:
“Therefore, as long as I stay within the writing rule brick and keep practicing on my spelling and writing, I should become a good writer at any time.”
I think the grid format was what led him to think of the rubric as a “rule brick.”
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Excellent eggcorn. I see many more examples of “rulebrick” on the web. These other examples do not involve grids. In modern speech “rubric” refers to a general rule. I think the eggcorners are simply imposing the more familiar “rule” on the first syllable of the infrequently-heard “rubric.” The “brick” part may also come into play, since a rule of behavior can be weighty, solid. A rigid, enforced rule can also be a brick, or a brickbat (i.e., a lump of brick), that we use to hit people over the head.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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A really nice find. It’s pretty rare, but I’ve tried to put together all the relevant citations that Google would actually allow me to view in context. I wonder whether the users might be thinking that an assemblage of a number of different guidelines becomes brick-like in its “weight.” In any case, schoolkids do seem to be the main vector for the spread of this one. I bet we’ll see the numbers increase even in the near future. Examples:
please read the rule bricks left to right they’ll explain certain rules and suggestions to you.
http://www.roblox.com/User.aspx?ID=638694
classes that give u assignments with rule-bricks to follow are the easiest
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:G7 … clnk&gl=us
Anyways at my high school have rulebricks or a guideline for marking Essays and it’s from 1-6.
http://www.unsolvedmysteries.com/usm369 … Discussion
andhere is the rulebrick
i know i spelt it wrong so what..
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index … 017AAEmL72
Dana Scully is told that the evidence she has presented cannot be placed in the final report to the Attorney General as “Corn crops and bees do not quite fall under the rulebrick of domestic terrorism.”
http://ramiusworlds.com/worlds/fight.html
i got an A in the class which is really hard to do but just follow her rulebrick and you should do fine.
http://ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=626351
One of my friends just got done with a contest and I’m going to see if she still has a rulebrick lying around on her computer that we could borrow.
http://walverina.deviantart.com/journal … ?offset=10
coop- the rulebrick for the 2 essays
http://forum.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuse … 7512444483
What I’m trying to say is that if we applied the rulebrick “it must
improve (or make possible!) only the majority of existing use cases”
to every IETF technology, we would get very little useful work done.
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/dh … 07656.html
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Students might also be thinking of a brick as a building block, therefore a rubric becomes a “rule brick” a brick made of rules for building their assignments.
CR
Last edited by CatherineR (2009-09-16 13:09:01)
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Yes, or a block of rules, following a similar metaphor.
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If you get a list of rules presented in a spreadsheet or table, you might also think of each little box of the table as a brick. I think this is a great eggcorn.
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