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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I don’t know what to make of this, because:
In my variety of English ‘so much for’ and “some much for’ are very differently pronounced.
It’s difficult to see the semantics of ‘some much for’ although I can sense something I can’t put my finger on.
It might be a regionalism.
If Google is to be believed, its use is huge.
You may have dealt with it before.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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I don’t remember an earlier discussion on this, though we now have so many posts that it’s pretty hard to keep track of stuff these days.
I’m not sure it’s truly huge, Google-wise, but it is bigger than I expected. I got 40+ unique Google hits for the string “some much for that,” and 180+ for “some much to do.” Not giant numbers, but fairly respectable ones in our weird little world of eggcornology.
I’d bet that a certain percentage of these just have to be WTF typos, in which the brain simply misfires and comes up with a malapropic substitution that shares some of the same letters as the target word but little of its meaning. Though the numbers are a little bigger than I’d expect for a WTFT. So the possibility of a regionalism probably can’t be ruled out, but in a quick search I couldn’t find anyone talking about it. Interesting find, in any case.
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I’ll bet a good many are typos compounded with spell-checker corrections. Som much is not an unreasonable typo for so much , and would most likely be corrected to some much .
There are millions of ghits (whatever those numbers mean) for some many , which of course can arise the same way:
– [ Traducir esta página ]Why do some many people believe in ghosts?
I think some many has a better chance of full eggcornhood than some much . The following list of Q/A titles from Yahoo Answers (note the dates [ene(ro) = January] and related subject matter) might well indicate that this is standard for someone, and thus not a typo. But perhaps that person is a native Spanish rather than English speaker. Anyway, fwiw:
Más resultados de answers.yahoo.com »
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Bing gives 743 million hits for “some much for”. I must say that a spell-checker seems to be a possible explanation for some of them, and NNS use for others, especially since it crops up in the context of eg ‘some much for global warming” as well as in eg ‘thank-you some much for the suggestion”.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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It occurs to me that speakers of English as a second language, many of whom rely on guesses from orthographical forms when it comes to pronunciation, and many of whom have no schwa vowel, are likely to think of some as if it were pronounced to rhyme with dome or home . The resulting soam much/many would be very close in pronunciation to so much/many . This would ease the eggcornical transition for them.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-02-08 09:17:43)
*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 this particular reshaping hasn’t been described before, but last September I wrote a post on the substitution of ‘some many’ for ‘so many.’
There seems to be a pattern here.
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I just ran across this construction at Urban Dictionary. If it’s not a WTFT, then it makes a bit of sense as the opposite of “not much”.
He was some much fun while he was drunk, but when he was sober he was really boring.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=floam
Edit: Wait, I just found an earlier post: not some much. Some much for my ‘opposite of not much’ idea.
Last edited by burred (2011-06-12 11:20:20)
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