Eggcorn Forum

We’re the only ones likely to be thrilled to find a googlenonce, or legomenonce. Remember, April 1 is official nonce day, when halfaxed eggcorns can be paraded with impugnity.

From where I’m sitting, “Joe Kroziel” in second position triggers some sort of bug that crashes Googlefight.

It would be a rare event to find a googlenonce eggcorn that was also a googlewhack. Googlewhacks do not require that the words be side-by-each.

Last edited by burred (2011-02-13 11:13:19)

Sorry, Joe!

Linguists (at least) use nonce as an adjective meaning “that only occurs once”. Of course counting depends very much on what and how you are counting, but the general idea is of something that is only written once in a particular corpus of data, or that is only said once in the history of mankind (how could we ever know that to be the case?), or that has only been found in the speech of a particular individual, or that was made up and used on a particular occasion rather than learned (but may have been invented on another occasion as well by somebody else) or something of the sort. One definition or description of an eggcorn has been “a sort of nonce folk etymology”; i.e. a private, not-yet-widely-accepted folk etymology.

So a googlenonce is something that shows up only once in a google search. (The word’s formation involves recasting the adjective as a noun, but that’s easy enough to do in English. As Calvin [or was it Hobbes?] says, “Verbing nouns weirds language.”)

I’m not sure of the reference of “that” in this sentence:

So, does that include words that were invented by someone …

I suppose you mean “the category of nonce linguistic structures”

Like any other word, nonce acquires its meaning by its usage (with overt definition being a possible but relatively unusual and certainly non-definitive kind of usage.) Yes, it has been used for invented words, whether purposely or inadvertently invented. I’m not sure what “mis-speaking” means in your sentence—if you mean the invention is judged a mistake by most other speakers, sure, the category of nonce words could include such. But by the stage where a term has become “adopted into the language” it is pretty hard to refer to it in present tense as a nonce structure.

I would not (and I think it very important not to) exclude the widespread adoption of a form judged erroneous by many, perhaps even including its original perpetrators, from “the natural development of language”. On the contrary, I think it is happening all the time and is highly central to the natural development of a language. Any shift in the language patterns that is great enough to attract notice is almost certain to be disapproved of by some, and many such will be judged erroneous. (It is also possible to see something as erroneous but approve of it—witness the gleeful adoption of favorite eggcorns by many who post on this site.)

fwiw, Harding, Bush and Palin were not the first to use the terms associated with them, though it is quite likely that they came up with them on their own (i.e. they probably didn’t learn them and very likely never heard or read them from anyone else.)

I don’t know a general term for adopted mis-speakings. I’m sure Kem or Pat or somebody can make a good suggestion or two.

I’ve seen David T. use nonce in other posts before and I thought it was a trendy way of saying nonsense! ... just as people say natch for naturally. (Now I’ll have to go back and rethink everything David has said).

Last edited by jorkel (2011-02-14 11:09:34)

Hey, an ounce of nonce is worth a pound of expound, and I say that with the most sincere impugniety.

Last edited by jorkel (2011-02-14 17:25:33)