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Chris -- 2018-04-11
If you wow someone, they go, “Whoa!†I had never encountered this before I ran into it in a student paper last week – and I’d planning to write it up this weekend for a few days. Weirdly enough, last night I was introduced to someone who clearly used “whoaing†for “wowing†in our ensuing conversation – I was so surprised that I think I visibly started. And once again I was too worried about giving offense to to take advantage of a golden opportunity to question an eggcorner. Examples:
learn more and do more homework, don’t jump right into it when they whoa you with their ‘knowledge’ which i see lots of weakness in, thus i’m sharing what i feel after years of learning.
http://sgforums.com/forums/14/topics/385341?page=1
please, come visit – whoa us with your entertaining litany on things that we probably never would have thought of ourselves
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/devi … 8-a-2.html
I am trying to make my boyfriend a great meatloaf however he mentioned how he was not a vegitable eater and did not want potato’s with his meatloaf. He has yet to have meatloaf with any other side dish beside that. I would like to surprise and whoa him with something different.
http://www.faq4me.net/Cooking_Recipes/772203.htm
And afterwards I just couldnt believe that Michael would no longer be here to sing, dance and whoa us with his awesome moves.
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:uR … =firefox-a
This posting acknowledges both the standard form and the reshaping:
Way to wow/whoa us with your passion and your astute use of tautology.
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=22613
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Very cool. It’s funny that I’ve never considered the reaction “Whoa!’ as replacing “Wow!” before—the former seems to capture more of a double take like “Stop and run that by me again”—but when you couch it as “to whoa” and “to wow” the comparison is front and center. Seems that it could be an intention usage in many instances … but also a drift in the meaning of “whoa” in other instances. The eggcorn usage (or naive usage) seems to derive from the fact that “Whoa!” is indeed close enough to “Wow!” that other usages of “wow” engender the same usage for “whoa.”
Last edited by jorkel (2010-04-25 22:09:52)
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Whoa is me! Succulent, low-hanging fruit.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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