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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
A free-standing cabinet (or chest) enclosing several drawers is called a “chest of drawers” in many places, and a “chester drawers” in a few places.
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Welcome to the forum, billvo. This has been suggested a number of times; a round-up of some of the earlier posts is here: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=426
I remember that the chief gatekeeper for the Database—the site’s owner, Chris Waigl—said she didn’t believe this was an eggcorn. That’s a pretty good sign it won’t get in any time soon.
That list you cite from the quirky “Dr. Language” is, uh, quirky. I suspect that our Database may have been used as a source for part of it, though there are lots of similar lists out there. What surprised me about this list was his odd claim about the word “long-lived”:
No: long-lived | Yes: long-lived
This compound is not derived from ‘’to live longly’’ (you can’t say that) but from ‘’having a long life’’ and should be pronounced accordingly. The plural stem, live(s), is always used: “short-lived,” “many-lived,” “triple-lived.”
http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/mispron.html
He seems to be saying that “long-lived” should be pronounced with a long “i.” Fortunately, the link he provides goes to the MW site, and a soundbite there in which the word is pronounced correctly—with a short “i.” I’m scratching my head—as I often do after an encounter with Dr. Language. I wonder how he pronounces “chimera.”
Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-01-04 18:29:17)
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There is a nice accoutrement: the chesty drawers.
Aha! a solution to the “invisibl-ink” problem.
(1) Underline the hot words by surrounding by plus signs +
(2) Identify it as a link by surround it with double quotes ” followed immediately by a colon
(3) insert the linked address with no space
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a soundbite there in which the word is pronounced correctly
Correctly? I say long-LIYved. That’s also the only pronunciation given in the the OED.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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kem wrote:
Correctly? I say long-LIYved. That’s also the only pronunciation given in the the OED.
A wikipedia page of differences between American and British pronunciation suggests that the short i is British and the long, American. This is diametrically opposed to the associated dictionaries, apparently.
The Canadian prairie tongue uses the short i. Is the source of the confusion mildly eggcornish? The sense changes from long-i lived as a component of “long-life-d”, to short-i lived as a past participle, or maybe simple past tense, of the verb live. This change of usage (or misunderstanding) must have been visual, a misreading. Or perhaps it spilled over from the imperative, as in “Long live the Québec libre”.
Last edited by David Bird (2010-01-04 20:40:54)
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Kem wrote:
Correctly? I say long-LIYved. That’s also the only pronunciation given in the the OED.
Kem, you may be consulting an earlier edition of the OED. But the current online version definitely acknowledges both pronunciations:
(-laɪvd) [f. LONG a. + live, LIFE n. + -ED2. Often pronounced (lɒnglɪvd), as if etymologically parallel to smooth-spoken, etc.]
[Pat’s note: I altered their phonetic rendering just a bit to make my life easier.]
We’ve talked before about the OED’s pronunciation pointers—they seem rarely to acknowledge American variants even when most Americans use a different pronunciation than the British standard. And in fact the American MW gives the short i as the first pronunciation, with the British pronunciation listed after an “also”; it’s clear they feel the short i is the dominant pronunciation here. (I’m glad to see that—I’ve also commented in the past about how I sometimes suspect that American dictionaries occasionally list the British pronunciation first when a different pronunciation seems clearly more common in the US.) This looks like one of those mid-Atlantic divides, with dissenting communities present on both sides of the Big Water. I’ve heard the etymological argument before, but I can’t recall having heard an American use the long i pronunciation. Perhaps that’s my Californian bias, but Dr. Language is an American, and I think his dismissal of the most common pronunciation of the word in the US as a mispronunciation is weird—esp. when the dictionary on his own site lists both without further comment.
[Later note: David’s comment was posted while I was already working on mine—I wasn’t trying to ignore him.}
Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-01-04 20:52:20)
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I went to the Wikipedia page David pointed to, and I was surprised to see that it also claims Americans use a long i with “livelong” while Britons use a short i. Both the OED and the MW agree that a short i is used in the word. The page may have errors—or it may represent an idiosyncratic opinion.
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Seems to be some static about which side of the Atlantic uses the short i. I asked two Brits tonight at supper (my Cockney brother-in-law and my Glaswegian son-in-law) and they had never heard anything but a short i.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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