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Chris -- 2018-04-11

#1 2006-09-17 11:26:06

Peter Forster
Eggcornista
From: UK
Registered: 2006-09-06
Posts: 1222

Jewel in the Crowd

5,010 googlehits
Europe and America as Underwriters of the International Order, by …That’s the jewel in the crowd. How it’s dealt with in the intellectual scholarship is to reverse the chronology and to suppress the documentation. ...
www.chomsky.info/talks/20060119.htm – 14k –
Its high time u kick the makers of those databases on their $5#_*&^$% and never use them I found one database which is Jewel in the crowd of databases which …
www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/S … 7&lngWId=2 – 84k –
With its smoldering smoke stacks, and its industrial lifestyles, a jewel in the crowd has emerged from common ground to take its rightful place in music …
217.64.195.2/en/ua/ua_elenco_artisti.php – 114k

I’m entering this in the slips etc as despite support from Jorkel, and Tom Neeley’s helpful signingposting, I feel less sure now of the nature of a definitive eggcorn than I did when I discovered the site only a fortnight ago.
The other reason for my trepidation is that I may have caught Chomsky eggcorning and that just seems too unlikely.
One further reason emanating directly from the last is that it is possible that American English employs the expression ‘jewel in the crowd’ where British English uses ‘jewel in the crown’. However, as the latter has 790,000 ghits, I am not convinced.
The latter refers to a valuable among lesser valuables, while the former smacks more of a diamond in the dust and therefore are not truly interchangeable as the sense, though similar, is definitely different. What’s going on?

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#2 2006-09-17 14:29:15

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

Re: Jewel in the Crowd

Google counts on Sept 17, 2006
781,000 “jewel in the crown”—established idiom
7600 “jewel in the CROWD”—eggcorn?

Peter: I sure like the imagery, and it looks like it COULD be an eggcorn, but I think you are right to be skeptical. I do not recognize “jewel in the crowd” as a common American idiom, nor do I know whether the associated story title by Adrian Warren was influential enough to spawn it. But, more than anything else, I think you are right when you imply that if Chomsky said it, then it probably wasn’t a slip-up!

So now I suspect we enter this time tunnel where we wait for someone who knows the true source to come forward!! Maybe THATs what takes eggcorns so long to get into the database: the wait for the refuting evidence!

I was going to add another web-based example or two, but I think you covered it well enough.

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#3 2006-09-17 14:37:25

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

Re: Jewel in the Crowd

By the way, one also sees a transformation of “a diamond in the rough” to “a diamond in the BUFF” (as in polish/ shine). This one is clearly intentional as “rough” and “buff” sound very different and would never be confused.

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