Eggcorn Forum

“Nouonce” is certainly a weird and interesting find. But I’m having trouble persuading myself that “nouonce” is just a substitution for “ounce.” Both the extra “o” and “n” need to be explained. Jorkel’s suggestion addresses that, but as he notes it’s difficult to find documentation for the idea.

I wonder whether this might be the result of people trying to “frenchify” this (already) French word. In French, our sound “oo” is spelled “ou,” so “nouonce/nouance” could be an attempt to represent the English spelling of the word through (more or less) French orthography. I think that possibility may be borne out by the fact that there are more hits for “nouance” than “nouonce”—it’s closer to “nuance” and further away from “ounce”:

nouance 140 unique hits using English-only settings
nouonce 21 unique hits allowing any setting

No, I don’t think you’re sleepily misunderstanding me—I did in fact get the spelling of your find wrong, and my explanation doesn’t work nearly as well for that form of it. Sorry about that.

And I too couldn’t find any more examples besides those you posted—in fact, for some reason, I couldn’t even bring up your “straightouttasection” citation on Google (though I could of course follow your link). Weird. Google has been puzzling me a lot recently.

Wow! You’ve got a citation from the notorious HUb’! I heard about this guy a few years ago—he posts (or at least used to post) on astronomy/UFO sites about how the moon landings never happened, many big historical events were largely hoaxes, etc. Lots of company there, I guess, but what set HUb’ apart was the weirdly poetic bad English he employed. A friend of mine was something of a fan (at least I’m pretty sure it was this guy he used to tell me about).

HUb’ uses bizarre spellings, bits of programming langs, lotsa puns, etc.—to the point that other posters on the forums have to try and translate his postings. Somehow I’m not surprised that the only use of “newounce” for “nuance” is from him.

It’s weird how small a world the Internet is despite its apparent infinitude. A few weeks ago, I found in a budget bin a CD by an obscure Dutch band called Dul Schicksal. It was odd but entertaining, and I decided to see whether anyone had written about it online. There were only a handful of relevant Google hits, so I clicked on the one that seemed to be offering the fullest description of the album. It was from some music forum and was written by a guy named Dadge. Uh huh—our Dadge (aka Adrian Bailey). (He hasn’t posted here in some few months, but Ken is the only regular who’s been around longer.) And Dadge had randomly picked up the CD in a record store budget bin in England. It’s a very small world….

Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-02-18 03:27:48)

I’m wide awake, but that doesn’t seem to help much, as usual. I’m also slightly off topic, as usual. The author’s (HUb’s?) use of the linguistic nuance “eithor” caught me by surprise:

eithor by means of Ommission or addition
no I dont get ever newounce?

I can’t help but wonder whether the author possibly meant to imply the “logical exclusive or” whose common usage is “either/or”. In other words, is it possible that the substitution “eithor” << “either/or” took place on purpose? If so, I think it’s a clever contraption, er contraction.

ghits( eithor ) = 21K. Unfortunately, it looks like Eithor might be “eithor” a proper name or/and a registered trademark. I wish google could be more sensitive about case (like the little search engine that could?).

kem wrote:

But isn’t the real eggcorn the insertion of “new” into “nuance?”

Hmmm. I was thinking of ounce as the eggcorn, but I guess I thought of new as part too.
Could this be a rare double-barreled eggcorn?