Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
In a recent discussion on the radio about the financial crisis in Greece, a guest suggested that grave economic consequences are ominent, blending ominous and imminent. Imminent, for me, holds no hint of foreboding, meaning only “to be in the offing, likely to happen soon, threatening in a nonthreatening way”. The dictionaries indicate that there is legitimately a suggestion of danger in imminence, a threat of bad fortune. The impending misfortune is written in the root words, which invoke the image of a mountain looming up and hanging over one’s head.
Yahoo questions
Google Base is it going to be the ominent death of classified ?
Libertarian Republican blog
In the ominent sounding movement-wide fundraiser letter, “The Future of LRC” dated Dec. 29, Burton Blumert writes:
Arm-wrestling forum
Negative pressure tend to rip muscles/tendon, at first it’s only micro tear, then it will progress to big tear then injury is omminent if you keep doing it.
paranoid blog
GREAT AND OMMINENT IS THE DANGE THAT IMPENDS.
The following example might blend together some of the omnifarious characteristics of God, and a bit of immanence, along with those omens.
Faith in war
When it climaxes @ the Battle of Baghdad, it’s almost as if you can feel God’s omminent presense as AK-47 rounds and RPGs whizz these brave men.
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Like it. You seem to think, though, that “eminent->ominent isn’t an eggcorn. I wonder. We have admitted alterior/ulterior to the database. The cases seem analogous. As long as semantics motivates the blending, I don’t see how we can deny eggcorn status to such replacements.
These word-on-word blends—they’re not really idiom blends, are they? Arguably, they are portmanteaux. But in a classic portmaneau the new word doesn’t really replace the words that contribute to the blend, whereas eggcorns are constructed as acorn replacements.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Good points, Kem. I overlooked eminent as an ingredient in the mix. In fact it’s hard for me to hold eminent, imminent, and ominous in simultaneous focus, especially when there is danger afoot. These days, admittedly, it’s hard enough for me to hold one thing in simultaneous focus.
I’ve always wondered about the use of the epithet blend for these chimeric words, grafted together. They’re definitely not idiom blends; they’re word blends. Looking into Louise Pound’s article, I see that she knew them already as blends, though she has lots of other elegant ways of expressing that. The idiom blend seems to have been coined later.
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I see that “imminent domain” is often confused with “eminent domain” and that “ominent domain” gets half a dozen hits: ‘They’re going to take your land very soon because they need it and you’re not going to like it ‘
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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kem wrote:
As long as semantics motivates the blending, I don’t see how we can deny eggcorn status to such replacements.
The vast majority of blends are semantically motivated. Semantic similarity (synonymy) is the classic case. Your mind (as Lewis Carroll described it so aptly in the preface to The Hunting of the Snark ) serves up two candidates for something appropriate to the situation, and instead of picking one over the other (our usual procedure when speaking/writing) you come out with something that has aspects of both. But of course there are other criteria to be met before you want to call them eggcorns (standardness, lack of awareness on the part of the perpetrator that they aren’t standard for everybody, lack of purposeful punning motivation, etc.) The vast majority of blends are not eggcorns.
These word-on-word blends—they’re not really idiom blends, are they?
Of course not—by definition. Idioms are defined as being multi-word. But that doesn’t mean the phenomena are in separate, hermetically-sealed boxes. It is useful to see a word, especially a one-morpheme word, as the limiting case of idioms measured along the parameter of complexity. Blending is a unified family of phenomena whether it is blending words, morphemes or formatives (sub-word structures) or idioms and syntactic structures (supra-word structures).
Arguably, they are portmanteaux. But in a classic portmaneau the new word doesn’t really replace the words that contribute to the blend, whereas eggcorns are constructed as acorn replacements.
Idiom blends may also be called, usefully I think, idiom portmanteaux.
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fwiw, there is a lot of round-tripping going on among imminent and eminent. Some cases probably rise to the dignity of eggcornhood, but most are likely just phonologically-based confusion. Some are purposeful puns too, of course.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-07-06 05:04:07)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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The vast majority of blends are not eggcorns.
Agreed. The main reason blidioms are not eggcorns is that they usually lack the crucial sound similarity. In “barking up the wrong alley,” “alley” doesn’t even try to sound like “tree.” But one could make an argument that “page-burner” is an eggcorn.
Last edited by kem (2015-02-17 15:21:10)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I overlooked eminent as an ingredient in the mix.
Sorry, “eminent” instead of “imminent” was a brain lurch on my part. But you are right, “eminent” may contribute a little to “ominent” coinage. “Eminent,” though, doesn’t have the overtones of danger that compel the “imminent->ominent” slip.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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