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Chris -- 2018-04-11
“Dumb Dumb Bullets”
When you get past the hits that refer to an article that made a deliberate pun out of this you get plenty of tongue-out-of-cheek references such as:
” Everyone who has read ‘a newspaper’ knows that the Hong Kong Triads have been supplying the Iraqis with AK 47s and dumb-dumb bullets in their nefarious plot to replace decadent …”
“When he shot me, the gun had those dumb-dumb bullets in it, they’re made to maim, to do more damage, and upon impact they explode. If you were shot with a normal bullet it might …”
and even:
” we picked up our bags and taxied over to Dum Dum Airport (whose name comes from the local Dum Dum Barracks, where the infamous dumb-dumb bullets were …....”
The logic behind that last one is hard to fathom.
I’m not going to stick my head above the parapet too far this time but isn’t this at least borderline egg-corny?On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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I’m don’t see the eggcorn. Perhaps I’m missing something. How do the semantics of “dumb” encourage the substitution?
Smart bullets have been in the news lately (they have a small chip in them), but I’m not aware of any movement to declare ordinary firearm munitions to be dumb—though I suppose the phrase will inevitably arise, in the same way that “smart bomb” gave rise to “dumb bomb.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I don’t think you’re missing anything. We are in the “slips, innovations and reshapings” forum after all, so I’m by no means claiming a find. But why would it occur to anyone to spell “dum dum” as “dumb dumb” unless they supposed that there was some semantic reason for it? Even without knowing what that was. It’s hardly the default spelling of /dum/. I don’t suppose anybody writes
“dumb dumb di dumb”
without trying to make the link with “unable to speak/stupid”.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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Dumb-dumb-dee-dumb-dumb…. Don’t rent to own.”)) Biewen: The industry has defended itself aggressively against what it considers unfair …
So many dumb people these days, dumb, dumb, dee diddly dumb..
And many others. Of course, as you suggest, most, and quite possibly all, of them are saying “unsurprising/boring and stupidâ€, as the second quote clearly is. That still doesn’t prove this is a purposeful misspelling/pun: they might actually think it is standard spelling and even a standard semantic connection (“the same wordâ€) for dum dum dee/di dum .
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I actually think there is a case for this to be at least marginally eggcornish: The use of “dum dum di dum†and its variants to express tedium easily leads by metonymy to description of the tedious thing (generally a person or a situation) which prompts that reaction, and we tend to characterize such entities as “dumbâ€, be they animate or not. This change from “nonsense syllable†to “meaningful morpheme [in this case meaning ‘meaning little or nothing’, i.e. ‘dumb’]†is very similar to the change from a = ‘?’ to egg . The repetition of the charge of tediousness fits in just fine.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-11-29 15:38:10)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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But dum dum bullets weren’t named that because they were tedious. Dum dum is a place name.
Oh, I see. You are saying that “dum dum bullets” became a hidden eggcorn, with the meaning of the singing syllables substituting for the name of the place, then a non-hidden eggcorn when the respelling “dumb dumb” replaced “dum dum.”
Poooooosiiiiibbblyyyyy.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Perhaps it is possible that someone with very little knowledge of firearms could assume a gun used with a silencer might require dumb-dumb bullets?
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kem wrote:
But dum dum bullets weren’t named that because they were tedious. Dum dum is a place name.
Oh, I see. You are saying that “dum dum bullets” became a hidden eggcorn, with the meaning of the singing syllables substituting for the name of the place, then a non-hidden eggcorn when the respelling “dumb dumb” replaced “dum dum.”
No, sorry I failed to be clear. I was saying that “dumb dumb dee dumb†could be an eggcorn whose acorn was “dum dum dee dum†, both as expressions of tedium (perhaps accompanied by drumming of fingers).
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The nearest I could have come to an eggcorn with the bullets would be to suppose that they required no intelligence to make, or were destined for unintelligent targets, or (with “dum-dum†as the acorn) made a droning, hum-drum kind of noise, or something of that sort. None of these seem likely enough to count as making much sense to me.
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Btw I had no idea that Dum dum was a place name—to me they were essentially nonsense syllables, and in that way like those in “dum-dum-dee-dumâ€. So maybe your “hidden eggcorn†was going on in my head, though I do not think I felt any strong identification between the two cases of nonsense syllables. Maybe other speakers do.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-11-29 16:54:05)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I still wonder what was going through the mind of the writer of:
“we picked up our bags and taxied over to Dum Dum Airport (whose name comes from the local Dum Dum Barracks, where the infamous dumb-dumb bullets were made”
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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