Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
For a White House that prizes itself on militating the effects of internal drama, the Craig resignation is a real failure.
http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/11 … ig_the.php
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The cited site has now fixed the sentence, proving the intention.
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I think these both look great – and there’re lots of examples of both out there. Some other examples might be nice…
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I’m having trouble seeing enough semantic overlap in these words to make them into acorn and eggcorn.
There is one sense of “mitigate” that does overlap. It is “mitigate against,” meaning “to be a consideration against.” This meaning, though, is an AmEng idiom from the late nineteenth century. The OED speculates that ”[this meaning of “mitigate”] appears to have arisen by confusion with the phrase to militate against…. This use of the verb has attracted adverse criticism from writers on usage since at least E. Gowers Fowler’s Mod. Eng. Usage (ed. 2, 1965). Webster’s Dict. Eng. Usage (1989) states that this ‘cannot yet be considered an American idiom and should be avoided.’” See also Zwicky’s entry on militate against/militate against in our database: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/309/mitigate/
If we accept the OED speculation, then the switch is a malapropism, not an eggcorn.
Last edited by kem (2012-08-30 22:20:42)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Yes, they’re both malapropisms. The question is whether they make any sense. To prize oneself rather than pride oneself looks to me to be a quite logical, eggcornish substitution. It falls to the idiom blend end of the spectrum but I believe I can make out an egg-shaped shadow.
The particular instance above of militating instead of mitigating, is more purely malapropositional, but not all the way there either. The circumstance here is the White House, and its efforts to squelch any signs of “internal drama”. To militate against leaks and keep an iron control on information (a current major preoccupation of the politicians in Canada as well).
I see that the dictionaries are militating against “militating circumstances”, which I suppose to be an idiom blend between “mitigating circumstances” and “militating against”. The intention of the utterers seems in this case to be a mix of the two meanings and therefore this would not be an eggcorn, though again results may vary.
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I like the find “prize oneself” and think it’s a clearcut eggcorn. Things that one has pride in can be construed as their own prize if one subscribes to the notion that certain virtues are their own reward.
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