Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2011-03-08
Spotted in the Daily Mail, 16 February 2010, in an article about Zack Ephron:
“Dressed in a red Oakley wetsuit, Efron was overwhelmed by the crowds of screaming girls clambering for a photo or autograph with the heart-throb.”
As the event reported took place on a flat beach, “clambering” was hardly possible.
clamoring, shurely?
It never ceases to amaze me when supposed professional journalists do things like this.
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Doesn’t the image of the girls climbing all over him fit? Or climbing all over each other to get at him? (I agree with you, though. And that image was probably not, or not consciously, in the author’s mind.)
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The “round-trip” error of clamor for clamber is also pretty common. And a surprising number of the cases I’d collected combined the notion of motion with that of commotion: e.g.
[battling a hurricane so strong one man had to cup his hands and shout in the other’s ear. Then they] clamored down the porch, hanging on to the handrails.
The boy soon wanted to be released from Emma’s lap, choosing to clamor around his mother as she and the other woman set out food for the men.
Is your “shurely” a product of the Law of Prescriptive Retaliation (a.k.a. The Nitpicker’s Curse), or did you do it on purpose? (“Editors excoriating catechreses are doomed to commit them.”)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-02-23 11:17:09)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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A classic. See also clambering for attention.
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I just found this in an old issue of Wired:
Yes, even Sting is clamoring aboard the interactive media bandwagon.
I think it’s a little less obviously eggcornish than the opposite (“clamber” for “clamor”), but I can picture someone who’s clambering aboard a bandwagon clamoring for attention in the process, so I guess I’d say this one’s an eggcorn rather than just a substitution.
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