Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
There are lots of ponderous boxes about, some of which may be due to subliminal influence from Pandora herself, but perhaps the examples below owe their existence as much to spell-checkers as eggcornish thinking:
He was of the view that an attack on Iraq would open a ponderous box.
Not only that, but there may be some other related components in this Budget that will have to be re-examined because you have opened up a Ponderous box.
... can not tell you track allows mirrors. There are more cars running traction control then mirrors. And that would open a ponderous box.
... booklets or to provided question booklets for the purpose of tallying the marks given to him as per the answer books then it would open a ponderous box.
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Opening Pondera’s box is a weighty matter. Think about it.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-07-27 09:06:58)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Unbelievable. A delicious addition.
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Given the overwhelming curiosity and enticement of the original, the variant ‘panderers box’ could be seen as an oddly apposite substitute too:
I do wish that we could all come to agreement on the basics, but do you think we have opened Panderers Box?
Some one told me one time that working with a nuclear reactor is like opening panderers box, You hope all goes well, But if not bad thing come out in a big …
it’s a panderers box once you have tried it once, like I did it never has been far from my mind …
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Peter Forster wrote:
There are lots of ponderous boxes about, some of which may be due to subliminal influence from Pandora herself, but perhaps the examples below owe their existence as much to spell-checkers as eggcornish thinking:
Firefox’s spellchecker does indeed suggest “ponderous” for “pondoras”, although MS Word seems to think I’m trying to write “Ponderosa” (and as expected, “Ponderosa’s Box” also gets a few hits as a cupertino). I can’t get Word to suggest “ponderous” for any misspelling of “Pandora’s”.
Last edited by tyler (2010-07-23 10:20:21)
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I tried Tyler’s experiments with Wordperfect. While I could get the spellchecker to suggest “ponderous” as a possibility, it was never first on the list of options.
Like David Bird (and apparently Peter as well), I find “ponderous box” amazing but almost unbelievable. Part of the problem for me is that the shift in word-stress between “Pandora’s” and “ponderous” makes the two words sound very different, and off the top of my head I can’t think of any widely accepted eggcorns that exhibit a similar movement.
And that retention of consonants (P-nd-r-s) accompanied by a replacement of vowels looks like other “cupertinos” we’ve seen. On the other hand, spellcheckers work—to a degree, at least—because they do mimic some of the types of errors speakers make. Maybe longtime lexical storage in our brains is a sort of low-molarity acid-bath that can spare the consonantal bones of a word while dissolving away its vocalic soft tissues.
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Maybe longtime lexical storage in our brains is a sort of low-molarity acid-bath that can spare the consonantal bones of a word while dissolving away its vocalic soft tissues.
Fascinating (and disturbing) image.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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....and the point of this discussion is?????
Mulling over what goes on in our minds to make this kind of example work (or even come to exist.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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No primecuts there, tocayo, just spammity spam.
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Yeah, it’s bad enough to spam us, but to insult us while doing so, too….
A quick note for posterity—David Tuggy quoted the post right before his own; I deleted that post in order to remove its spamminess. David wasn’t originally committing a non-sequitur.
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Sorry all. My sense of smell abandoned me long ago; I didn’t realize that it had so affected my ability to differentiate spam and steak! (We had gotten a bit off topic, in fact.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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