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Chris -- 2018-04-11
A moment of silence, my fellow philologists, for the sad career and imminent demise of “stint.†This humble word, which entered the language from Old English/Anglo-Saxon roots, thrived for centuries at the core of English vocabulary. From an original sense of blunt, dull, “stint†managed to spawn, as noun and verb, at least a dozen distinct lexical meanings. In current dictionaries several of these meanings are marked as obsolete. Most of them should be-these days “stint†ekes out a meagre living in fossilized phrases such as “don’t stint [the sauce]†and “a [brief/short] stint as.†If words were people, “stint†would be a down-on-his-luck chap along the roadside holding up a sign “Will conjugate for bread.â€
Many of the semantic jobs assigned to “stint†were lost to Latinate rivals. In recent years even some lowlife Anglo-Saxon competitors have pressed their claims: hundreds of web pages authors substitute “stunt†in “stint†idioms using as bridge the shared meaning a period of activity. Four examples:
Musician bio: “I did a stunt as a DJ in New Jersey because there was a shortage of country music up there. â€
Muckraking post on media blog: “Before becoming mayor of East Cleveland he did a stunt as an administrator for the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Association â€
Facebook group site for primary school: “Then … did a stunt as a “teacher” there in 1994, and this year I took my daughter Ashlynne there for her Arbor Wildlife Camp!â€
News release on Aussie soccer site: “Phil was an ACE coach for many years and returns after a brief stunt in other clubs. â€
Last edited by kem (2010-08-11 22:18:20)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Totally hilarious eggcorn which borders on a malapropism because of the unintended humor. But, stunts and stints are both brief events, so it seems legit.
I wonder if these are the same people who think skinks are skunks.
Last edited by jorkel (2010-08-11 21:56:11)
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They stank, but mercifully it was brief.
Insurance quotes
Prior to the Insurance Adjuster I did a brief stink as a PI, just like those those that were in that Church.
Author Bio
After a brief stink as a lecturer back at Cambridge, Keynes served with the British Treasury
Sport fans—Introduce yourself
I grew up playing basketball and as the years went on I just morphed into different Suns players while playing on my drive way. It began with KJ, then Kidd, unfortunately Starbury, and to the best of my abilities Nash. I even had a brief stink as Rex Chapman
Religious upbringing before becoming a witch
Then a brief stink as a [b]orn again catholic, that lasted all of a week as it just didn’t fit me at all
+Hurray for Chinese homework
He came to California after a brief stink as a waiter at a bar in New York.
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And now, a word from the world of interventional cardiology:
Following a brief stent as a Research Specialist, he returned to school and received his Medical Degree from the Medical University of South Carolina.
www.charlestoncancer.com/cHolladay-char … les-hol…
He later served a brief stent as CTO of IronGrid, which built nimble Java performance tools.
oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006761
I did a brief stent at Mashery as their ops guy, then pulled the trigger and quit to do Loggly fulltime.
www.geekceo.com/entry/opportunity-sucks
After a brief stent apart pursing other musical interests, the two kicked it back up again forming an acoustic act ...
www.myspace.com/oldbarberbridge
After returning to San Diego following a brief stent in Malibu; Jeff Goodall (aka DJ GOODS) began spinning at San Diego State University …
www.facebook.com/pages/DJ-GOODS/121806633293?v=info
After a brief stent playing for the Toronto Blue Jays organization, Wade moved to California to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. ...
waderikert.com/
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The OED notes a historical eggcornish confusion between “stint” and “stent:”
In certain uses this vb. closely approaches in meaning the etymologically unrelated STENT. Apparently some confusion has taken place between the two verbs, and as the phonetic variants stent, stint are common to both, it is sometimes doubtful to which verb a particular use belongs.
The “stent” that the OED is referring to is the past participle of “stend,” a form of “extend.” This “stent,” which has largely fallen out of use, may not be the same as the “stent” that Ken notes, the device for keeping an artery open. The derivation of the medical “stent” is disputed. One possibility is that it is based on the last name of a dentist.
Last edited by kem (2010-08-12 11:52:05)
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And back again:
Feb 14, 2010 … It can be argued that stress and worry can stint the growth of your hair. So, keep relaxed and try not to think about hair loss. ...
Gavel to gavel coverage on breach media wrong cases will stint the growth of deep house operators and the new growing threat to national security
This problem can seriously stint the growth and efficiency of the technology. It does solve the huge problem that many electric cars have
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One problem, fp, with the “stunt > stint” citations is that they could be examples of relict words from linguistic refugia and thus actual usages of “stint.” “Stint ones growth” was still in common use in the nineteenth century.
It’s fascinating to look at the development of the various context phrases of “stint” in Mark Davies’s Corpus of Historical American English. If you go to the COHA site (http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/) and put ”* stint *” (that’s asterisk-space-s-t-i-n-t-space-asterisk) in the search box you will see that the use of “stint” in phrases such as “give without stint” (without limit) and “to stint oneself” (limit oneself) peak in the mid-nineteenth century and disappear from American English by the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast, the phrasal contexts “a stint as/in something” and “brief/short stint” do not show up in the database until WWII, despite the fact that the noun “stint” with the meaning “an allotted time” is attested in British English as early as the sixteenth century. One has to wonder if the use of “stint” to refer to a passage of time isn’t a piece of unofficial British military lingo that Yanks brought back from Europe.
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One problem, fp, with the “stunt > stint†citations is that they could be examples of relict words from linguistic refugia and thus actual usages of “stint.â€
I always start itching just a little when people mention “linguistic refugia” or “dialectal survivals.” Sure, such things happen, but I worry that there’s a bit of logical circularity involved in some individual invocations of these ideas. When we’re thinking about lexical history, I think continuity makes more sense to most people than some idea of, say, “lexical polygenesis,” in which a word or phrase is recreated over and over. So if a word appears today that was supposed to have died out or become rarer a century ago, it’s pretty natural for us to speculate that it’s quietly lived out an unrecorded shadowy existence somewhere, only to slip back into the light of day recently. And yes, this could happen. But the problem for me is that we often don’t have any direct evidence for the existence of the hypothetical refugium, and the its existence is supported largely by our sense that word histories are generally continuous—implying that there must have been someplace where the older term could have been preserved. The ideas of continuity and linguistic refugia can seem to support each other without any independent evidence for either. That doesn’t disprove the idea—but I always want to see if there are alternate explanations.
The idea of “stinting” growth is first cited in the OED about 25 years after “stunting” growth first gets recorded in the very early 18th C. That’s pretty much what I’d predicted to myself when I went to the OED—we’ve seen that reshapings often come into being just a short time after their acorns, and this looks to be another example. And the stunt growth>>stint growth substitution makes sense. Both words share a good deal of semantic overlap—they either denote or strongly connote ideas like “shortening,” “lessening,” “stopping,” or “putting a limit to something.” They also share the same consonantal skeleton—which isn’t surprising when you consider that they go back to a common Teutonic root (*stunto-). I think these two were made to be confused with each other; that’s going to happen whether earlier uses of “stint” are preserved in regional usage or not.
In contrast, the phrasal contexts “a stint as/in something†and “brief/short stint†do not show up in the database until WWII, despite the fact that the noun “stint†with the meaning “an allotted time†is attested in British English as early as the sixteenth century.
That is fascinating. I wish I knew of work being done on the history of phrases like “brief stint.” It’s always so startling to realize that an extremely common and unremarkable collocation might have sounded odd to your great-grandparents. You’re right that this particular pairing appears to have gained currency only in the 20th C, with the frequency of citations exploding after WWII. But when I went to Books.google.com and looked for occurrences from before 1930, the ten or so instances (starting about 1900) all seemed to be from Americans—at least when I could track the nationality of the author. (I thought Kipling was on the list the first time I did the search, but he wasn’t there the second time.) Books.google.com is never definitive proof, but “brief stint” might just have gone the other way across the Atlantic during WWII.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-08-12 20:46:48)
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