Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
First-time contribution, so let me know if I’m doing this right…
Anyway, I heard this in general conversation and corrected somebody. It made me remember Language Log, however, and I looked it up on Google later. There isn’t a huge number of hits, but the interesting thing is that the majority are in public health articles (which you might expect). Also, the switch is well enough ingrained that people are using “posts a risk” so that it agrees with singular subjects. You can get around 30 hits for each form.
While “post a risk” is pretty homophonous with the original, “posts a risk” is a syllable short, so you’d think people would notice the difference if they were making the mistake on sound alone. That to me is a sign of a fairly mature eggcorn.
I’m guessing that people are understanding the word “to post” to mean something along the lines of “to deliver” or “to display” (the latter taking on a much more visual aspect ever since people started posting things on the internet).
So, let me know if this is a good addition.
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Outstanding analysis.
Last edited by jorkel (2007-03-26 21:55:06)
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I’m bumping this topic up because I ran into an instance today. You’d think that Ursula K. Le Guin’s seminal science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) should have been around long enough to get an error-free text, but the recent paperback version I was reading on the bus had a number of slips, including this one on page 259:
I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself post no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy.
There’s an obvious typo on the very next page, so “post no threat†may be one, too, but as salt-bagel noted, the substitution has obvious eggcorn potential. It almost feels like a reasonable alternative to me when the word “threat†is involved (we’re already so used to people posting threats), but “post no risk†feels more strongly non-standard to me.
These are very common. Some more documentation:
And being only 34 weeks pregnant, the incident posted a risk to both her and our unborn son.
http://pacotiny.multiply.com/photos/alb … ug_10_2008
Our initial effort centered on having the medical records (MR) department produce reports to identify potential duplicates and then merge the records post discharge if the duplicate posted a risk to patient care.
http://www.allbusiness.com/technology/126006-1.html
Mayor Lonny Napper said town council passed a motion last week calling for the provincial government to impose a moratorium until “a comprehensive, independent and peer-reviewed scientific study can confirm that industrial wind energy sites do not post a risk to community health and environment concerns.â€
http://windconcernsontario.wordpress.co … -projects/
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Does anybody have a different edition of The Left Hand of Darkness that they could check to see if this error has been there all along or if it got introduced during the (re)editing process? Did LeGuin herself make this error? I do not understand the way things are done when new editions are prepared, but it seems like some things get retyped or otherwise made vulnerable to new errors when you wouldn’t expect it to be necessary. Your “obvious typo†on the next page makes me suspect this is one of those cases. Of course, if an editor purposefully introduced it, it makes a pretty strong case for eggcornhood. But how can you tell it isn’t another kind of error rather than a purposeful “correction�
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-09-15 01:53:18)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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This passage is transcribed 5 times on the web, of which 4 say “pose no risk” and the fifth says “impose no risk”. On this evidence the change looks exposed facto.
Post a risk is particularly apt in the field of public health. Nevertheless, I would have been leery of this one without the evidence of nonWTFitude provided by “posts” and “posted”.
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David T wrote:
but it seems like some things get retyped or otherwise made vulnerable to new errors when you wouldn’t expect it to be necessary.Your “obvious typo†on the next page makes me suspect this is one of those cases.
Oh, me too—which is why I mentioned the typo on the next page and the fact that my printing was more recent (the copyright page is unhelpful, but a celebration of the publisher’s 50 year anniversary on the spine implies that this copy was printed no earlier than 2003). My point wasn’t that Le Guin herself had used a non-standard form. But this is a marquee book for Ace Books; you’d expect, at least, that a number of attentive pairs of eyes would have gone over the text. Whether “post” was introduced as a “miscorrection” or as a mindless typo, the fact that it survived the vetting process says that someone trained to notice these things didn’t notice it—and that may have been because it made sense to them in context. However the slip got there, it points to the possibility that this might have wider currency as an intentional error—which seems to me to be the case from looking at online instances.
Also, as a connoisseur of published typos, I have to say that the presence of errors “all along” in a book is not a useful guide to authorial intentions. A good case in point is one of my favorite novels—Little Big by (forum member) John Crowley. The original publication was riddled with typos, many clearly mindless ones; some were corrected for a later mass market publication, but a few new typos were also introduced into that version. And though a new (and corrected) collector’s edition is about to appear, the mass market version is out of print, and the version currently available seems to replicate the errors of the original—nearly three decades after publication. I have no idea how this kind of thing happens.
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David B wrote:
Post a risk is particularly apt in the field of public health. Nevertheless, I would have been leery of this one without the evidence of nonWTFitude provided by “posts” and “posted”.
It’s an interesting double-whammy, that the acorn and the eggcorn each has a 2-syllable form where the other has a 1-syllable form ( posts vs. poses , and posted vs. posed ). Leaves no doubt that the eggcorn has taken up residence.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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