Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
From a story in “Liberty Annual 2010” (a “benefit book” raising money for a good cause—the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund): “How will ol’ Miss Columbia fair in this new world order?”
This one is apparently new to this site. It’s easy to see it as merely a misspelling, but it sure is a popular one—googling “how will we fair” yields over 22,000 hits, the vast majority of which are this eggcornish usage. I call it eggcornish because I think it likely that, in at least some cases, the writers are assuming that to “fair well” means to get along OK (not great, nor poorly, but fair).
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Here’s another cite I just encountered in an Internet post about New Zealand: ”...it gets plenty of rain and has good snow pack in the mountains, so it will fair well with rising global temperatures.”
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I don’t know, Dixon, it might be just a Brians’s errors type homonym switch. Or WTFT.
People in the southern hemisphere will fair fairly well from the immediate aftereffects as most weather anomalies have a hard time crossing the equator.
Oops, apocalypse
Currently, a 60k strength nation would fair farely well against a 100k strength nation because of the empty strength given by tech.
Cyber Nation forum
The Database had an early entry for lazy fare capitalism. The “fare” in there has notes of welfare, maybe. But it could just as easily have been lazy fair.
Capitalism? You mean lazy fair, or are you talking about regulation? Free enterprise only works if monopolies are prevented. This can’t happen in lazy fair capitalism, as the regulations to do so are not allowed.
Yahoo questions
If they won’t exhibit any control of spending nor reign in the (Raygun) deregulation lazy faire capitalism... we will see within a couple years the last hoo-rah for the US.
http://2012forum.com/forum/viewtopic.ph … &sk=t&sd=a
Or maybe, for the attractive, eat-the-poor entrepreneuse:
The lassie-fair (libertarian) solution to the distribution problem – do nothing – results in 19th century boom and bust cycles
Gardening and economics
Dog-eat-dog lassie-fair economics.
Last edited by David Bird (2012-04-28 16:32:31)
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David Bird wrote:
I don’t know, Dixon, it might be just a Brians’s errors type homonym switch. Or WTFT.
Pardon my ignorance, but you’ve lost me (and I assume some other readers) with the jargon. Could I impose upon you for brief definitions of those two terms?
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There is patent need for a handy glossary on this forum. The idea has been bruted about several times. I’ll pass the buck another time and point you to jorkel’s post on Paul Brians’ Common Errors in English Usage. Paul has been a steady contributor to the forum. (Phew, I’ve been in Quebec long enough that it now feels strange to capitalize letters in titles. Though it does look good.) Our glorious administrator came up with the name WTF typo which he subsequently shortened to WTFT, whence I contracted it. I’ve seen WTF typos referred to repeatedly around the web, though not in that economical guise. It’s like when you look back on what you’ve typed, and you see you’ve put no for know, or worse, know for no*. As I see my “Best before” date shrink in my review mirror, I spawn WTFTs like fanfic authors pop out similes, and I must constantly retrace my steps to wipe for prints.
*In my case, the course of true love was thwarted when I saw that my erstwhile fair correspondent had written something like, “There’s know way!” Alas, I was so ignorant in those days. If I’d only none!
Note that this post was edited a few minutes after submission.
Last edited by David Bird (2012-05-01 09:31:08)
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David Bird wrote:
There is patent need for a handy glossary on this forum.
Agreed!
Thanks for the clarification of the jargon terms. I agree that “fair” for “fare” could be just a WTF typo or a homonym switch, but still think it’s very plausible as an eggcorn because of the obvious meaning connection.
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Just had occasion to check out this error again, after reading a story in which it occurred many (at least 4) times. To comment on the last couple of comments:
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I think it’s important to realize that explanations are not necessarily either/or.
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Especially here, when thousands of people are repeatedly making “the same” (or is it the same?) mistake. It might be a WTFT for one but a “Brians’s errors type homonym switch” for another, and an eggcorn for a third. Or a WTFT one time I do it (when I don’t have the “OK” meaning in mind) and an eggcorn the next time (when I do.) All that without taking into account percentages and sequences of motivations, e.g. I write it wrong as a WTFT and then rationalize it to myself eggcornishly, but only slightly in the back of my mind because I’m mostly off thinking about something else.
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I think a lot of the judgment calls we make relate to what 1. probably, 2. we think, 3. other people are thinking 4. some reasonably large percentage of the time. Pretty iffy. But still worth doing, 2. I think.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-09-22 19:00:30)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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