Eggcorn Forum

Discussions about eggcorns and related topics

You are not logged in.

Announcement

Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to if you wish to register.

The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.

Thanks for your understanding.

Chris -- 2018-04-11

#1 2012-01-26 14:42:44

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2850

intercalcate << intercalate

Adding extra days and months in order to make a calendar conform to position of the earth in its orbit around the sun has been called “intercalation” since at least the seventeenth century. We can see in the verb “intercalate” the Latin prefix for “between” and the Latin stem that gave birth to “calends” and “calendar.”

In the nineteenth century the word was metaphorically extended to the act of embedding in a standard series. Geologists became fond of the word, lacing their language with talk of “intercalated strata.” The word appealed to mathematicians who needed to insert numbers into an ordered set. Biologists turned to “intercalate” to lend a soupçon of opaque sagacity to their prose. These metaphorical uses of “intercalate/intercalated” in modern corpora far outnumber the literal uses of the word.

“Intercalate” is popularly (hundreds of web examples) spelled as “intercalcate.” I assume users are trying to find a reference to calculation in the word.

Three of the web examples:

Astrology and horoscope site: “.The Shahenshahi and Kadmi variants of the calendar do not intercalcate leap years”

Flashcard on a quiz review site: “These are natural cancer chemotherapy agents with a flat structure that directly bind or intercalcate between DNA base pairs, preventing _ and causing DNA strand breaks”

Interviewer question to poet in published book: “...often you intercalcate your poems with various languages”

Last edited by kem (2012-01-26 16:17:18)


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

Offline

 

#2 2012-01-27 09:02:22

Peter Forster
Eggcornista
From: UK
Registered: 2006-09-06
Posts: 1222

Re: intercalcate << intercalate

An unfamiliar acorn for me. Here’s a variant easily construed if the word is learned by ear rather than eye:

We inter collate the calendar by adding extra month 7 times in 19 years.

The study involved naturally infected F344 rats that were allotted to groups to intercollate the investigation of several variables, including nonimmunosuppressed …An unfamiliar

Offline

 

#3 2012-01-27 12:12:51

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2850

Re: intercalcate << intercalate

I was just about to add a post on “intercollate/intercolate.” Great minds think alike (As do small minds. Sometimes great minds also think like small minds and small minds think like great minds. Parallel ponderings prove nothing but parallelism, I fear.)

The spelling with one “l” (“intercolated cells” examples here ) suggests that the user is permuting “calate” rather than inventing “intercollate” from Latin precursors.


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

Offline

 

#4 2012-01-27 13:48:26

David Bird
Eggcornista
From: The Hammer, Ontario
Registered: 2009-07-28
Posts: 1690

Re: intercalcate << intercalate

intercolate could also be a blend of intercalate and interpolate. I’ve got only this nonce to add, which looks to be a blend of intercalate and inculcate.

Career advice From what you’ve said, it seems like you just need to bugg*r off for a while and figure what you want to do. See if they’ll let you interculcate (break your studies for a time)

From there it’s a short hop to:

facebook Fidelity Fiduciary Bank If the importance of Saving is incultivated in the mind of a child at a tender age , he is very likely to continue doing so in future too.

Offline

 

Board footer

Powered by PunBB
PunBB is © 2002–2005 Rickard Andersson
Individual posters retain the copyright to their posts.

RSS feeds: active topicsall new posts