Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2011-03-08
This was a mistake made by a friend of mine, who assumed that the old folks with oxygen tanks were…oxygenarians!
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Very nice one! Thanks for adding your rhetorick to the forum. (I.e. welcome!)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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“Oxygenarian” for “octogenarian” would be a great eggcorn. If it is real. Are you sure your friend wasn’t punning?
When I tried to find the error on the internet I could only come up with two examples that (1) didn’t look like they were puns, (2) weren’t referring to people on restricted diets who were “eating” little more than the oxygen they breathed, and (3) weren’t in transcriptions where the transcriber may have simply recorded what they thought they heard. The two examples are:
Blog entry: “AOL turned 25 years old last week. In Internet years that makes them a qualified oxygenarian, the Internet was only opened up to commercial interest back in 1989.”
Myspace open letter: “Yet, entire generations are growing up to where in sixty years it would not be beyond the realm of reason to imagine a couple of oxygenarians embracing each other…”
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Sadly, all the examples of “septicgenarian” seem to be deliberate puns. There are loads of “septigenarians” and “septagenarians” but no discernable eggcornery is at play. In fact ‘septuagenarian’ would have stumped me and I think that I’d have opted for something like one of the first two if I’d been asked what came between ‘sexagenarian’ and ‘octagenarian’.
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I’d have opted for something like one of the first two if I’d been asked what came between ‘sexagenarian’ and ‘octagenarian’
For most folks, what comes between sexagenarian and octogenarian is death.
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kem wrote:
“Oxygenarian” for “octogenarian” would be a great eggcorn. If it is real. Are you sure your friend wasn’t punning?
No punning. She was genuinely confused and genuinely embarrassed.
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To hear it from the mouth of a repentant person is the eggcorn gold standard.
Not everyone generates such good eggcorns. Perhaps you should follow her around with a microphone. She may be to eggcorns what Spooner was to spoonerisms.
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