Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Is this not the most basic eggcorn? Kids believe there is a letter named ELEMENO in the middle of the alphabet. Citations abound. Remember your own childhood. Or look in Google under ELEMENO or LMNO.
I looked in the Eggcorn Database, and saw nothing. I looked in the eggcorn search window, and got nothing.
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ABCD puppies! LMNO puppies. SAR2 – CMPN?
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From website http://ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=4047324
Whilst learning the aphabet, did anyone else ever take the verbal form of “lmno” for some mystical unwritable single letter called “elemenno”? —Kim (grimstitc…), December 3rd, 2003.
I thought the nopeque was the, er, thing at the bottom of the Q. —OleM (omhalc…), December 3rd, 2003.
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In the above examples, posters provide their interpretation for letter strings l-m-n-o (read: “elemeno”) and n-o-p-q (read: “nopeque”). The first poster believed “elemeno” was a mystical, unwritable letter, and the second thought that “nopeque” was the bottom stroke on the letter Q. (And, that’s fine as far as that goes). But these are clearly interpretations borne out of a child’s imagination rather than a word substitution of the misheard strings. There is nothing in the make-up of these neologisms which would suggest a specific, well-defined, and universally-derivable image. Overall, I’m not quite sure how to classify these neologisms, but they don’t seem to be eggcorns.
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Jorkel – Good analysis. Thanks. Might they be extremely abstract eggcorns? The kids know what a word is like, even though they do not know very many words. And they recognize the “word” ELEMENO when they learn the alphabet song.
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Back in the Seventies there was an abortive attempt finally to impose the metric system on the US. Saturday Night Live satirized this in a skit by introducing the new “metric alphabet,” with only ten letters. One of the ten, of course, was “elemeno.”
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