Eggcorn Forum

jorkel wrote:

I think your cite/sight example is a legitimate eggcorn. I also think there are plenty of legitimate eggcorns derived from sight/site … particularly when preceding unseen.
It’s fascinating that this triple homophone possesses at least two distinct eggcorns. Can we find the third leg to the triangle?

Good question, jorkel! Googling “site any examples” yielded about 19,000 hits, of which fully half of the sample I read (i.e., 10 of the 20 hits on the first two pages), used “site” for “cite”. Possibly just a misspelling or a non-eggcornish misuse of homonyms in every case, I suppose, but consider this one: “Can you site any examples of what commercial / office land is selling for in the CBD of state college borough?” It seems possible that, in the context of discussing building sites, the use of the word “site” was at least partly due to a meaning connection in the writer’s mind, thus perhaps qualifying this case as an eggcorn?

Dixon

I just encountered another one of these today: “There are a lot of important British groups that sight Faust as an influence too.” (from an online chat-list devoted to the musical group Faust). I did a search on Eggcorn Database and discovered that I’d already started this thread some time ago and forgotten about it (and of course this thread isn’t the first mention of sight/cite on the Eggcorn Forum).

jorkel had written:

I think your cite/sight example is a legitimate eggcorn. I also think there are plenty of legitimate eggcorns derived from sight/site … particularly when preceding unseen.
It’s fascinating that this triple homophone possesses at least two distinct eggcorns. Can we find the third leg to the triangle?

Dixon Wragg wrote:

Good question, jorkel Googling “site any examples” yielded about 19,000 hits, of which fully half of the sample I read (i.e., 10 of the 20 hits on the first two pages), used “site” for “cite”. Possibly just a misspelling or a non-eggcornish misuse of homonyms in every case, I suppose, but consider this one: “Can you site any examples of what commercial / office land is selling for in the CBD of state college borough?” It seems possible that, in the context of discussing building sites, the use of the word “site” was at least partly due to a meaning connection in the writer’s mind, thus perhaps qualifying this case as an eggcorn?

Site < cite occurs in other contexts as well, and in some of them it looks eggcornish to me, for other reasons than the straight homonymy or a context of discussing building sites.

Someone sited precedence in that an employee in Tlalpan had been allowed to have a 15 años in our facilities. [“cited precedent”; this was a native English speaker despite the use of “años”.]

I just decided to ask my professor who told me how it was about how you can see tension with the four squares, siting the example of one of one small square surrounded by 3 big ones.

Siting the example of Jesus Christ, the cardinal urged the congregation to never preach for publicity.

this case was dismissed by the judge over seeing it siting several reasons but the description the court gives of the original whistleblower emails is very telling

There is sense in (available through) these usages. Citing is a kind of placing (siting) of responsibility or of a point of access for an argument. When you cite someone in support, you are strategically siting their words/influence where they will buttress your argument or point of view.
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The question of course is whether those using the misspelling have such reasons in mind. Quite likely most don’t, but if any do, this is an eggcorn in their case.
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I appreciate jorkel’s insistence that even though site/cite/sight is not in itself an eggcorn, there may be “plenty of legitimate eggcorns derived from” it. We should look at homonyms generally that way: although we may judge their homonymy to be purely accidental, it is quite possible that legitimate eggcorns are based on it.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2018-11-06 09:59:34)

True, dat.