Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
(In again! Can the curse have been lifted?)
The fourth Sunday of Lent is Mothering Sunday. In an increasingly secular society which knows little of the religion to which many ostensibly belong, it is no great surprise that such a misunderstanding should come about. I came across this some months ago when two ladies in front of me in the newsagents were talking of the looming weekend and Mothering Sunday – “What about daughters?” the other cried, and tempted though I was to clarify, I simply bought my paper and fled, bemoaning internally that I couldn’t bung the encounter here on the forum.
What’s in your heart doesn’t change if you go to church or a mosque. We used to do Beavers and Cubs and I used to take the kids to mother and son day at the church, St George’s Day to the prayer meeting, Christmas. And God is all one.
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Add that to our list of religious eggcorns and folk etymologies.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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It has affinities with (anti-)Lehmann’s terms as well. Mothering Sunday is a kind of proper noun.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2014-06-29 15:56:40)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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bung the encounter
What does this phrase mean, Peter? I’ve never come across this sense of “bung” before.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Kem – I’ve just used it in the ‘pairents’ entry too so I must be using it more often than I realise. It conveys, or at least is meant to, chucking something in without much consideration, flinging in a cavalier fashion. The word I’d rather use is far more obscure – hoy – so I translate from inner-dialect-speech into something informal but more acceptable. Without becoming too self-concious about it, though I fear a wheel has been set in motion, I think I might use it in a defensively flippant way to distance myself from any serious, protracted argument which might ensue. I have no cudgel to wave and a compromised attention span, as you may have noticed…
Last edited by Peter Forster (2014-08-10 07:37:44)
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I see it in the OED:
Bung: “To throw (violently); to send; to put forcibly.”
Strange that I’ve never heard it before. It is marked as “slang,” though, and it is an extremely low-frequency verb. On the Google Ngram of the bung verb the frequency is about as low as it can be and still appear in the Ngram database—and it shares this frequency with two other “bung” verbs that have different meanings.
Thanks for teaching me a new word. I’ve got lots of things I’d like to bung
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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It’s a perfectly good word for me: it sounds a tad schoolboyish: ‘Bung me a rubber’ (an eraser!). Nowadays it may also be fairly common in its Londonish meaning of ‘bribe’ (noun and verb).
And of course it’s the stopper of a barrel.
‘Hoy’ is North-East, isn’t it? I’m not going to say Geordie. Nobody wants to annoy a Mackem.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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Kem – glad to be of service and I look forward to your bungables with baited breath.
Juan – or may I call you One?- such sensitivity to historical regional friction suggests a UK resident who has ventured further north than the Wash. Now I must dispense with the shades, Zapata moustache and flamenco guitar I had mentally endowed you with. Or perhaps there is a real forename you’d like to share, as it’s a good while since you were issued with the passwords, secret handshake manual and key to the treehouse.
Nobody wants to annoy a Mackem.
I suspect there may be one or two in Newcastle who would like nothing more. For those further afield, Sunderland (Mackems) and Newcastle (Geordies) are two Northern towns around 10 miles apart but with distinct cultural identities and a strong historical antipathy, dating back to 1610 at least.
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I’m John in the flesh, which I’ll happily answer to here.
My Northerner credentials are Leeds University in the 70s, studying Eng Lang and Lit, where dialect studies were a big deal. One lecturer, Stanley Ellis, was a kind of forensic dialectologist. He was consulted on identifying the Black Panther killer of Leslie Whittle and on the Yorkshire Ripper case.
So we undergraduates did some of the very lowly fieldwork on isoglosses and so on. Add to that that one had to be careful about where other students came from and a lot came from right across the North.
What’s more I’m a South Yorkshire-man by marriage though an effete Southern ponce by birth.
So I know my ginnels from my twittens.
No mustache, guitar, donkey. Shades yes.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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Twitten! A new word for me – I’ll place it here between the ginnel and the lonnen.
I remember reading about Stanley Ellis, dubbed a latter day Henry Higgins. He’d narrowed the supposed Ripper’s accent down to the Castletown area of Sunderland but thought him a hoaxer. The police chose to ignore this advice, with disastrous effects for several more women.
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