Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Just bringing over here a recent discussion on alt.usage.english about “graded cheese” for “grated cheese,” noted by one James Hogg. I don’t think we have mentioned it in this forum yet.
The discussants in the newgroup are divided about its eggcornicity. My feeling is that “graded cheese” may be an eggcorn. Something that is graded can be particle-sorted for size. Grated cheese could be thought of as sorted in this way. Or perhaps one has scraped a chunk of cheese over a grater the way a road grader scrapes a road.
Hundreds of examples out there, especially in recipes. Like this one:
A recipe: “1 cup graded cheese”
Last edited by kem (2010-02-09 01:52:49)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Sorted by size makes sense (for an eggcorn explanation). It was the first thing that I thought of, and it was also mentioned in the link.
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I like the road grader image. Tactile.
Another suggestion on the alt.usage site was “graded cheese” as in judged. This is admittedly a long shot, but the organoleptically endowed can become cheese graders.
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I remember making the point in a paper long ago that, in my dialect of English, if you say you are [ˈgɹeʲɾɪŋˈpʰeʲpɹ̩z], you might be judging and assigning grades to exam papers, but you might just as well (as far as the phonology goes) be shredding documents. For me and my ilk graded/grated are also normally pronounced identically*, so this is an orthographic eggcorn. For others of you I expect there is a consistent pronunciation difference (e.g. slight lengthening of the vowel before /d/, or non-flapping and maintaining of voicelessness for the /t/.)
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*(Of course no two pronunciations of anything are absolutely identical. And, it would not surprise me if extremely careful recording and analysis of dozens of pronunciations of these words in my speech would discover subtle tendencies in one direction for grating and in another for grading . But there are a huge number of pronunciations which for me and other speakers of my dialect are completely acceptable with either meaning.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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