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Chris -- 2025-05-10
From a note left for me by a friend I’m house-sitting for: “Be sure the Motorola box is powered on when you watch TV to sink the cable to the TV.” Googling “sink up” yielded quite a few unique hits, many of which appear to be this eggcorn—though just how many is uncertain, because a lot of them were ambiguous to me. It seems unlikely to be just a misspelling, as anyone who’d spell it “sink” presumably has no idea that the word is supposed to be short for “synchronize”. As far as the meaning-connection goes, well…uh…maybe they’re thinking in terms of hierarchical layers of electronics (audio, video, etc.), so that syncing them up would involve “sinking” one thing down through the strata to connect it up with something on a lower level?
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I loved it when a church choir “lip-sank the anthemâ€.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Could also be the influence of the electronic term “heat sink.” See http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1750
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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