Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
From the liner notes of the album “Whatever and Ever Amen” by Ben Folds Five: “Where this technique has served to distort the meaning of the original text, the fuzz tone of the electric bass guitar or a virtuosic drum fill has been inserted to detract the listener temporarily from the actual song.”
Presumably not an eggcorn, as I see no meaning connection, but it gave me a little chuckle anyway.
Dixon
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I could see an argument for connecting the semantic fields of “distract” and “detract.” One problem with calling the “distract->detract” switch an eggcorn, though, is familiarity ratio of the two words. “Detract” would come to most lips less readily than “distract.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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kem wrote:
I could see an argument for connecting the semantic fields of “distract” and “detract.”
Well, maybe, but it seemed to me to be a long thin stretch.
One problem with calling the “distract->detract” switch an eggcorn, though, is familiarity ratio of the two words. “Detract” would come to most lips less readily than “distract.”
Hmmm…Is familiarity ratio a well-established eggcorn criterion? I don’t recall having seen it mentioned before and, offhand, I don’t see why it would make a bit of difference, in this or any case.
Dixon
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I think the familiarity ratio thing is best seen as a normal (prototypical) characteristic, something you kind of expect to see but don’t expect it all that strongly. Like expecting a cat to have stripes, but if it doesn’t you don’t start to doubt whether it is a cat or not.
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That having been said, I don’t sense that huge a difference between the words—neither of them is in the first rank of common words, but both of them seem quite well-established to me, and either comes to my lips quite readily.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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