Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I just encountered this on an Amazon music chatlist:
“I tend to agree more with the following snipit of a review…”
This usage (“snipit” for “snippet”) has been mentioned only once, in passing, in the Eggcorn Forum, without any determination of its eggcornicity. It seems pretty eggcorny, but the meanings of the words may be too close for it to qualify as an eggcorn: “snipit” obviously combines “snip” and “it”, while the etymological dictionary says “snippet” is a diminutive of “snip”. Thus, in both cases, “snip” is the root word, so I suppose that shared root word disqualifies it. Interesting variation, though; I’d never seen it before.
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Works for me. I don’t think only “root words†(harder to define than you might think) count, or that sharing one disqualifies a candidate pair. Those cases do tend to be less spectacular or entertaining, but I don’t see that as reason to deny their eggcornicity.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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David Tuggy wrote:
Those cases do tend to be less spectacular or entertaining, but I don’t see that as reason to deny their eggcornicity.
Even ignoring the problem of misspellings here (words like bucket, ticket, market, pocket, puppet, etc. are commonly misspelled with an i for the e in the last syllable), I don’t see this as an eggcorn. The reanalysis of the noun snip as the verb snip is both interesting and entertaining, but snip and snip are just too close for this to be an eggcorn. It’s not even a borderline case in my book.
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What about the reanalysis of – et as it ? That was what was uppermost in my mind.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Yes, I understand that, but there’s no major change of imagery here—even though there’s a major grammatical shift. The reanalysis is a linguistically interesting one that can make sense in context—which pushes it in the general direction of eggcorns—but it fails a crucial test for eggcornicity.
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Yes, if the definition stresses the word major I would tend to agree. For me a grammatical shift is pretty much always (and a shift of grammatical category is, by definition, always) a kind of imagery shift. But I do agree that if, as in this case, (a) little but the grammatical category changes and (b) the overall result comes out to be practically the same, it is much less major (striking, etc.) than are cases where a whole different set of associations are called up (i.e. a different area of semantic structure is activated).
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So if the definition includes the word “majorâ€, it comes down to the question —obviously a matter of degree— of how major major needs to be to count.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-01-18 21:56:53)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Well, gosh, that’s weird—we seem to be agreeing. For me, the thing that really makes an eggcorn is that sudden flash where I think, “Wow! They think acorns are named after eggs!”—that realization that someone else has come up with a way of explaining a word’s meaning that seems like a wholly different semantic pathway compared to the standard. Though I’ll admit that I’d probably call some things “weak” eggcorns that didn’t create meaning in a way “wholly different” from their acorns.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-01-18 23:27:48)
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