Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
“Tinder” is something intended to incite or inflame. It’s clearly not a word in everyone’s vocabulary. So, it’s not surprising that it might be substituted with the more common “tender” when the imagery favors it. Those who utter “tender box” may see it as an equivalent to a “sore spot” or a delicate situation.
Examples:
Iraq Braces For Worst After Shrine Blast – Reader comments and …It is fast becoming a tender box. Our 140,000 troops cannot put the genie back in. Perhaps we should put the Mexican border fence, which cannot get built, around Iraq and get out …
www.cbsnews.com/8618-500257_162-2917555 … Id=5478858
Dhimmitude at the movies: Ridley Scott’s new Crusades film “panders to …Surely we don’t need any more propaganda to add fuel to an already tender-box situation. If the Middle East escalates in violence after this movie’s premiere, Scott should be held …
www.jihadwatch.org/2004/01/dhimmitude-a … es-film…
JAPAN AND AMERICA, c1930-1955 THE PACIFIC WAR AND THE OCCUPATION OF …The situation today is truly that of a tender box. Personally, I wish we would discontinue … his graduation from the US Military Academy at West Point, his three years on the War …
www.ampltd.co.uk/collections_az/JapanAm … ption.aspx
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To separate the misspellings from the semantically motivated substitutions is going to be difficult. All of the examples you mention, for instance, occur in the context of war or munitions, which makes me suspect that they are simple spelling errors. If we could only turn up a folk etymology—someone explaining the idiom in terms of the traditional meanings of “tender.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Actually, I limited the search to tinderbox variants (rather than simply tinder) and prescreened the examples so they would pertain to war. Apparently there are a lot of Google hits for tender box which pertain to something else—a cash register for legal tender? I can’t really tell. Hence, I limited the examples to ones where a tinderbox might be used to describe a politico-social situation.
Typos are a possible error source (or even the Cupertino effect). As with all eggcorns, we would just die to have the first-hand explanation of the utterer’s thought process.
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I like this one. Looks like another case where short e and i can be confused. Look at this example:
Carolina Mountain Sports Do you really have the developed skills of gathering tender and kindling, and wood for fuel.
Here the implication is “tender” grasses and twigs collected to get the larger stuff going.
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I think David B’s invocation of “tender grasses” provides a decent semantic basis for this, but the problem is it’s still not easy to get around the potential misspellings—I’m getting 397 ughits for the legitimate phrase “tinder and kindling,” so the “tender and kindling” variant may easily be a predictable misspelling without any implication of “tenderness.”
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