Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2011-03-08
I understand the metaphor used in “get a lot of flak” or “get a lot of flack”, but “get a lot of slack” sounds like a mishearing and/or misinterpretation to me. The strange thing is that when I do a web search I get more hits on “get a lot of slack” than “get a lot of flack”. So Is this an eggcorn, or have I been living under a rock the last 40 years and failed to realize that “get a lot of slack” is correct?
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To me they’re a kind of opposite: if someone gives you a lot of flak they are not giving you any slack.
*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 if you look at the usages that come up on doing a search, like “This app seems to get a lot of slack, but I like it.”, it’s clear that “get a lot of slack” is intended to mean “be heavily criticized”.
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So it’s an opposite used malapropistically. That is not unheard of (surprisingly common actually). But I don’t know how to make sense of it—how does the phrase with “slack” add up to mean “be criticized/griped about” or anything else that fits those contexts? So for me it is, while an interesting and fun error, not an eggcorn.
*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 think something sublidiomatic is at work. Being slagged off is much the same as getting a lot of flak, but then we’d have to accept that ‘slag’ could be misheard/misinterpreted as ‘slack’ – not too unlikely a leap, perhaps?
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