Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Learned endings like +antic and +actic have a certain interchangeability to them, so it’s possible to imagine that people would be coming up with “didantic†even if “pedantic†didn’t exist. Still, pedantic and didactic are pretty darn close in meaning, and I think that some of these combos must be a conflation of the two terms. Examples:
It’s not didantic with a deluge of references like the other books I read.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R11KJMGW0YYA9A
Now, to be clear, I mean that in the more spiritual sense of caring for your neighbor, not in a didantic way, such as trying to dictate who you should and should not be allowed to love and marry.
http://tcjewfolk.com/shaking-high-holiday-tradition/
It may have sounded a bit didantic but she is dead on.
http://caloriecount.about.com/ideal-bod … e-ft141362
i find dude’s act to be shallow and pedactic …
http://forums.projectcovo.com/archive/i … 04763.html
Perhaps, but I’m also one of those people who gets a stick up her butt about stupid pedactic things like this.
http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthre … 180&page=7
I was going to mention it, but then thought that people might think I was being ungreatful or pedactic or something
http://www.reachonair.com/forum/viewtop … 9&start=30
One thing that doing this post showed me is that I simply don’t know what some people mean when they write either “didactic†or “didantic†– there are some odd uses of those words out there. But I did figure this one out:
I had a stupid doctors appoiment so I had to go to the pedactic (or how ever you spell the damn kid doctor)
http://www.booksie.com/young_adult/nove … /chapter/6
Last edited by patschwieterman (2010-10-16 00:51:10)
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A blendiferously lovely reciprocal pair.
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Your second example is interesting. A little more of the context:
the responsibility of the community of people who share a set of values to come together to mold our world into a place that reflects those shared values. Now, to be clear, I mean that in the more spiritual sense of caring for your neighbor, not in a didantic way, such as trying to dictate who you should and should not be allowed to love and marry. Getting our hands dirty by building a playground is an important way we can make this world reflect those values we share as a community.
What is pedantic or didactic about dictating who you should and should not be allowed to love and marry? (I would not have thought opposition to gay marriage, which I suppose to be the target of this comment, was a particularly pedantic position.)
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I guess this is a meaning shift (which I bet wouldn’t be that hard to document) of the source words of the blend. Didactic or pedantic people stipulate; they tell the rest of the world that certain things (the things they are didactic or pedantic about) are important and must be done in a certain way in order to be correct. That may be taken as the essence of their didacticality and pedanticity (or didacticism and pedantry, if you want to be picky about it).
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But I’d bet (a little, not a lot) that dictatorial is somehow blended in as well.
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Interesting usage of “spiritual†here: it is non-spiritual to dictate or impose your values, but spiritual to get your hands dirty by building a playground so that the world will reflect your values. Hmmm.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-10-16 08:10:27)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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“Pedactic” seems like the most obvious eggcorn. It’s the least expected reshaping. In the case of “didantic,” the American nasal “a” attracts the nasal “n.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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What semantic reshaping do you see going on, kem? Or are you implying that switching from one morphological adjectivizer (-antic) to another (-actic) is enough to make an eggcorn?
I had thought I would have been more amenable to such a suggestion than you would. But even for me it seems a pretty far-out case. Like Pat, I would keep it in the “Slips, innovations …†section rather than among the submissions.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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David T—
I suspect “pedactic” is a blend of “pedantic” and “didactic.” If so, the question is whether it is an eggcorn squash or just a portmanteau, a blend. Seems to me that portmanteaux, when they result in terms that are close in sound to one of the source words, become eggcorn squashes when they are taken up as standard terms by a speaker/community of speakers.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I’m certainly (very highly) persuadable to the suggestion that blending (portmanteau formation) is going on. I don’t see that as anything near a strict alternative to productive extension of the STEM- actic contruction to a new case: rightly understood I expect that productive morphology, even inflection but certainly derivation, is much more blend-like than many standard accounts allow. But if we are to allow productive morphology in as “restructuring†that counts for eggcornhood, an awful lot of other cases that are usually not considered eggcornish must be admitted. I was trying to apply the criterion of the restructuring making a discernible, or even a notable, meaning shift. I don’t see that there is such a change here, and was wondering if you did.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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