Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Heard from my neighbor today: “A fool and his money are soon departed.â€
“Departed?†Checking with Google shows that my neighbor has plenty of company. There are dozens of examples of changing “parted†to “departed†on the net. I’m not sure the switch alters the meaning much.
Example phrases:
i am no more interested in debunking nonsense….the fool and his money are soon departed
A fool and his money are soon departed, or in this case probably wrapped around a pole somewhere.
Like the saying goes a fool and his money are soon departed…so I went to the LHS and departed with a big wad O cash upgrading to a B/L Lipo setup for my GWS Mustang.
A fool and his money are soon departed,so it was said many years ago.Boy,do I feel foolish !!
I keep suggesting it might not be the best uses of resources, at least according to the vision I would personally impose on the world, but a fool and his money are soon departed (in this case he keeps thinking it is some other fool and some others’ money).
Last edited by kem (2010-03-18 21:24:14)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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To me it changes the meaning from an image of someone separating one from the other, perhaps even slicing between them with a knife, to an image of them, under their own steam, leaving each other and going off in different directions. It doesn’t feel like the same image at all, under the hood. It’s an eggcorn for me.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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On second (and third) thought it seems to me that the idea of zooming off in different directions may be blended in from the (well-established, for me) notion of them being parted. Why should they not be departing together? (From Here, of course, the place where “I†am which is therefore the locus of rationality and stable thinking—aka horse sense.)
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In Kem’s second example above, I definitely get the feeling that both of them are wrapped around that telephone pole (is the money the guy’s Z-car?), and perhaps that both of them have joined the ranks of the dear departed (to invoke yet another image shift).
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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If you interpret de- as a negative prefix, it could be an over-negation along the lines of using “dethawed” for “thawed”.
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