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Chris -- 2018-04-11

#1 2012-11-02 04:11:11

Craig C Clarke
Eggcornista
Registered: 2005-11-18
Posts: 233
Website

"Mistake in identity" for mistaken identity

Well dang if it ain’t been forever since I’ve been around here.
Problem is that eggcorns have become too scarce on the ground, I don’t find them anymore.
I’m thinking they may have been fished to the brink of extinction.

Anyway, this one first spotted here:
http://theocarinanetwork.com/topic/7255034/1/#new

You can find more googling on “case of mistake in identity” but you have to wade through tons of links to a song lyric.

I THINK this qualifies… while it means the same thing essentially, I think there is a very slight shift in imagery here. “Mistaken identity” seems to place the cause in the person making the mistake, whereas “mistake in identity” seems to put the focus somewhere slightly different. I can’t express it better than that.

Hey, it’s my first in what, three years or something? I can;t be too choosy. :)

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#2 2012-11-02 22:48:10

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

Re: "Mistake in identity" for mistaken identity

Welcome back, Craig. You have been missed.

Think your last post may have been Palin’s refudiate in 2010. You can catch up on some of the best eggcorns in the last year in the best of 2011 thread. True, new eggcorns are getting hard to find, but some gems have turned up in the last year.


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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#3 2012-11-04 13:38:19

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

Re: "Mistake in identity" for mistaken identity

Good to see you again, Craig. This kind of “mistake in” parsing a phrase has come up repeatedly, usually involving extraction or concretion of small particles from larger words. They’re consistent with the original sense of the phrase but just slightly remodelled. They must arise by the same mechanism that produces eggcorns and mondegreens so that they’re clearly fodder for this forum. This particular one, ‘mistake in’ for ‘mistaken’, might even be emblematic. The syntactic analysis has gone just slightly wonky, however. I think it’s an eggcorn. The modification is not so much in metaphor as in syntax, which is a kind of imagery I guess.

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