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#1 2008-02-16 16:21:00

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

Nuounce for nuance

“Every little detail must be accounted for, every nuounce that makes him one of the greatest characters.”
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:0L … =firefox-a

“I really like it, even if I don’t understand every nuounce of it now.”
http://sas-spidey01.livejournal.com/2006/11/19/

“Nikita had wanted to know how he felt and thought about every nuounce of his and her lives. ”
http://straightouttasection.yuku.com/sr … quot-.html

Obvious what’s going on here. A person hearing the phrase “every nuance” might be more familiar with the phrase “every ounce,” and though the meanings are different it still fits the situation.

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#2 2008-02-17 09:42:04

jorkel
Eggcornista
Registered: 2006-08-08
Posts: 1456

Re: Nuounce for nuance

Interesting suggestion. I tried to take it one step further to “new ounce” ...with little success so far. This was the only ambiguous one I found, but I don’t think it applies…

Quiz – I Found This Kingdom….And I’m it’s New Princess?! [...
With a new ounce of determination, I reached for the sides of the door and gripped the edges with my hands, ready to push forward. One, two, three. ...
www.quizilla.com/users/z2ferndigi/quizzes/I%20Fo… – 31k – Similar pages
http://www.quizilla.com/users/z2ferndig … Guy%20%5D/

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#3 2008-02-17 17:03:07

patschwieterman
Administrator
From: California
Registered: 2005-10-25
Posts: 1680

Re: Nuounce for nuance

“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

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#4 2008-02-17 21:01:22

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

Re: Nuounce for nuance

Well, I just figured that people heard “every nuance,” and being familiar with the phrase “every ounce” just figured that for some inexplicable reason the extra syllable was added to “every ounce” to make it fancier, etc. I think there’s a lot of that in our language – people thinking an extra syllable makes the word more “high-fallutin” without putting any thought into it beyond that.

But you may be right, too. There are so few examples that its hard to know for sure, I think I may have posted all of the examples on google, after weeding out uses where nuounce is apparently a trademark of some product.

EDIT: Whoops, Pat I notice you are spelling it differently in your posting than what I actually found:
(““Nouonce” is certainly a weird and interesting find. But I’m having trouble persuading myself that “nouonce” is just a substitution for “ounce.”)

What I found was not nouonce, but rather nuounce, with the ounce actually spelled out.
I’m not sure if you just mistyped or if the different spelling you used “nouonce” was what you were considering in your analysis. I also may be misunderstanding you, I’m sleepy. :)

Last edited by Craig C Clarke (2008-02-17 21:19:12)

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#5 2008-02-17 22:38:09

patschwieterman
Administrator
From: California
Registered: 2005-10-25
Posts: 1680

Re: Nuounce for nuance

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.

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#6 2008-02-17 23:39:22

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

Re: Nuounce for nuance

Just found this:

“after having just watched McArthers Farwell
on pbs (80 years of famous speaches)
its pretty “CLEER” to me its just one lie after another
eithor by means of Ommission or addition
no I dont get ever newounce?”

http://www.bautforum.com/conspiracy-the … ief-2.html

only result for newounce.

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#7 2008-02-18 03:21:14

patschwieterman
Administrator
From: California
Registered: 2005-10-25
Posts: 1680

Re: Nuounce for nuance

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)

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#8 2008-08-11 16:31:59

Dadge
Eggcornista
Registered: 2005-11-10
Posts: 82

Re: Nuounce for nuance

:-)

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#9 2008-08-11 18:15:10

rogerthat
Eggcornista
From: Denver, Colorado, USA
Registered: 2008-05-19
Posts: 64

Re: Nuounce for nuance

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?).

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#10 2012-09-10 22:37:13

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

Re: Nuounce for nuance

The discussion on this thread seems to have picked up on permutations of the second part of “nuance” (e.g., :”newounce/nuounce”). But isn’t the real eggcorn the insertion of “new” into “nuance?” The web has a large number of examples of “newance.” Speakers reimage a nuance as the subtle suggestion of something new.


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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#11 2012-11-02 04:19:08

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

Re: Nuounce for nuance

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?

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