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Chris -- 2025-05-10
A sound bite is a sampling of audio from a larger piece of communication. Any sampling clearly provides just a bit of something, whence the reshaping “soundbit.” Note that “bit” is not taken as the past tense of bite and is not a reference to bits (bytes) of information.
I just got back from a FEMA Detainment Camp, page 3Jun 9, 2005 … If this gets out early enough then we’ll get a sound bit from FEMA stating these are outrageous claims (and then hopefully behind the scenes …
www.belowtopsecret.com/forum/thread167902/pg3 – Cached
Almost Evil: I met The GuildJul 31, 2009 … Well TNB already had a sound bit from her from Blizzcon last year. What about Vork? Or the nice lady that plays Clara, Robin Thorsen? ...
almostevil.blogspot.com/2009/07/i-met-guild.html – Cached
Whisper down the Alley (forum edition) [Archive] – weebls-stuff forumsSomeone will then reply to this person’s post with a sound bit of them saying what they thought they heard that person say in their post. ...
forum.weebls-stuff.com › ... › Forum Lame Forum › Archive – Cached – Similar
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Note that “bit†is not taken as the past tense of bite
How do you know that? It has been (= is?) for years in my mind and doubtless others’. Does that not count?
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Or are you talking about the particular examples rather than about etymologies (folk or otherwise) and saying that in switching from soundbite to soundbit there is no need to go via the past tense (or past participle) of a verb to soundbite ?
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Note that another possibility here is is an omission typo.
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All said, I agree with you in suspecting that there is eggcorning going on here.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-09-12 08:18:46)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I just wanted to grab that one particular usage of bit in the examples, David. Omission typo is still possible, but the final product had such a familiar ring to it that I did a double take.
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