Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Found on CL, in a personals ad:
“Oh and because i have an ad on Craigslist does not mean i am desperate im just waving my options.”
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Those two links that Kem posted are mainly about wave(r ) and waive(r ). I didn’t read them too closely to see whether anyone interjected any passing comments about “weigh,” so the current thread might pick up on that aspect.
“Weighing one’s options” seems to have almost an opposite meaning from “waving one’s options.” The former seems to have an optimistic tone of retaining options while the latter has a pessimistic tone of signing them away. We’ve had discussions in the Forum about whether an eggcorn can take on a meaning which contradicts the progenitor (acorn), and we seem to have divided up into two camps over that issue.
At any rate, it is valid to say that if enough context is provided, one cannot replace the other and still make sense. That’s where I am with the current example. The context seems to suggest that the intended meaning is “I’m just weighing my options” rather than what is written, “I’m just waving my options.” It’s as if the person who made the statement didn’t really understand the meaning of “waving”—and that has the makings of a malapropism rather than an eggcorn.
Even so, I’m not entirely sure what to make of the mistake because I’m baffled by how such an accessible word as “waving” might be construed to mean something akin to “weighing.”
Last edited by jorkel (2010-11-03 21:46:12)
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Jorkel, you could be right in thinking ‘waving’ for ‘weighing’ is a malaprop rather than an eggcorn.
Re you being “baffled by how such an accessible word as ‘waving’ might be construed to mean
something akin to ‘weighing’, my take on that is that young people, in particular, these days, rely
on spoken language as opposed to the written, and if you’ve ever tried to decipher the actual words
in today’s popular songs. the source of your bafflement would be obvious: Many words are SO
poorly pronounced that one could understandably misconstrue any statement’s meaning. By that
logic, I can easily imagine confusing ‘a weighty subject’ with ‘a wavy subject’ or even, if the singer
were an Australian, with ‘a wily subject’.
And anyway, when the mis-speaker’s frame of reference, language wise, is so UNcomprehensive
(compared to earlier generations), it’s easy enough to see how the weigh/wave error came to be.
catsamore
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catsamore wrote:
my take on that is that young people, in particular, these days, rely
on spoken language as opposed to the written, and if you’ve ever tried to decipher the actual words
in today’s popular songs. the source of your bafflement would be obvious:
I deal with college students most days, and I don’t have the least trouble deciphering their words; I’m skeptical that their pronunciation is any “better” or “worse” than that of any generation.
I’m also surprised that young people today might be characterized as being more invested in spoken than written language. Between the internet and text messages, they probably write more than any generation in history. Perhaps they make greater use of non-standard forms and constructions than other generations (though I don’t know how one could prove that), but that’s a different question, I think.
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