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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Can you spot the vocabulary error in this passage?
Web page about the operetta H.M.S. Pinafore: “Little Buttercup, a buxom bumboat woman, attempts to sell her wares to the crew. Among the ship’s hands is a handsome sailor called Ralph Rackstraw who seems to cause great concernation to Little Buttercup.â€
Bumboat, you say? Should it be gunboat? Nay, matey, “bumboat” is a real word. A bumboat is a small craft that shuttles supplies to moored ships. W. S. Gilbert wrote one of his whimsical Bab ballads about a bumboat woman nicknamed Buttercup. He recycled this material, as he did the themes and characters of many of his early ballads, when he later collaborated with Sullivan on their famous operettas.
The vocabulary error in this passage comes in the last line. The word “concernation†should be “consternation.†“Consternation†is a feeling of anxiety or confusion. It derives from a Latin root with the same meaning and was adopted by English speakers in the seventeenth century, at the height of the Latin madness. A feeling of anxiety, however, is also a feeling of concern about the outcome of an event, so replacing “constern-“ with the similar-sounding “concern-†is an eggcorn gimme.
I can spot on the net at least twenty examples of the replacement of “consternation†with “concernation.†There are probably many more. A surprising number of the substitutions are by writers who seem to have–otherwise–a firm footing in literary English. A few examples:
Pregnancy support forum: “My breasts are now fairly sore, bigger and hard (to my husband’s joy and my concernation!).â€
Post on a multiplayer gaming forum: “With Denmark seemingly having an unending supply of armies to send into Sweden. King Christian of Denmark leading his troops, defeated the Royal Army of Sweden several time’s causing great concernation in the Royal Court where the National Assembly resided.â€
Post on a wiki: “Actually the large glacial stone with a bronze plaque added later was moved to the site in the 1960’s – much to the concernation of the local residents from whose beach it was removed.â€
Response to a newspaper article: “Much to the concernation of the Bush White House, the US DoEd found that kids from the same socio-economic strata did as well if not better in public school versus their private school cohort. â€
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Very nice. An eggcorn, perhaps, but also quite possibly a blend on some occasions. I mean that people like you’n’me who know both words might start writing “my concern†and switch to “my consternation†part-way through.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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(Hey that was post #1000. None of you will be able to see that: this is post #1001!)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Excellent. Nice references too. Palmer pegs “bumboat” as a double-yolker for baumbord, and Skeat sees it as deriving from bun-boat. Gilbert extracts the usual ribald maximum from the word.
Congratulations tocayo! You really should be moving up in gloriousness (if that were possible), from dashing devil-may-care eggcornista, to a holder of the keys to that exalted treehouse way up there in the canopy, of which the rest of us can only imagine the keenness. And Kem is also on the brink. I had earlier suggested the mantle of wise egger for this lofty status.
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Also:
To my constern, I could only venture Vim, Mathematica, and some tentative candidates to his growing list, so please pay his post a visit and contribute.
To my constern, I found that the new turbo charger does not suit this engine since it was meant for a TWO Stroke Engine
Congress Wednesday is forcing the broadcast television networks to upend their prime-time schedules yet again, much to their constern.
Not a round-tripper, but similar in being a logically suggested way of doing it the other way.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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