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 2013-02-12 19:11:20

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

overweaning << overweening

The “After Deadline” blog by the New York Times editors found a slip that may count as an eggcorn. This text came across the editing desk:

It’s easy to make fun of Ryan Seacrest — for his ubiquity on the show business landscape, for his over-weaning ambition, for his role in unleashing the Kardashian clan.

The editors go on to comment:

“Over-weaning” might describe an overly aggressive effort to shift babies or young animals off mother’s milk. Here, we meant “overweening.” (Spell-check should have helped on this one, but I think the hyphen in the original confused it.)

Had they looked further, the editors would have found that the error is bread-and-butter common. Indeed, almost all of the thousands of examples found by a Google search for “overweaning” are substitutes for “overweening.”

The substitution is no doubt motivated by the obscurity of “overweening.” The opacity of “overweening” stems in part from the progressive loss of the ancient AS “ween” verb. As the N-gram shows, the old word has reached a low plateau in recent decades. If not for sword and sorcery fiction, it would, I ween, have gone to ground.

But is the switch an eggcorn? Users of “overweaning” may be thinking about the maternal care dimension of “wean” rather than the more up-front (pardon the pun) sense of the termination of liquid care services. If so, “overweaning” could convey to its users a sense of s-mother love that wouldn’t be far from the meaning of “overween.”


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

Offline

 

#2 2013-02-12 21:11:42

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

Re: overweaning << overweening

I’m having trouble with this one. It’s hard to see the sense of weaning in the hits. Underweaning I might see, as in spoiled or coddled. Might it be that the perps, even those who add a hyphen, don’t know what weaning means?

BTW, thanks for this one – I didn’t have a good grasp of what weening and therefore overweening meant until your post induced me to look it up. I suspect an impoverished substitution is being made by overwhelming, which fits the grandiosity but loses the presumption and distorted self-image of overweening.

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