Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to
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
This seems so obvious I hesitate to submit it, but working for peace and the alleviation of suffering is a noble pursuit and many who have heard of the Nobel Peace Prize have no idea who Nobel was but do believe it is awarded in recognition of noble deeds. 41,600/802 ghits not all of which can be typos:
Since its inception, the Noble Peace Prize hadn’t been won by an … The Noble Peace Prize is worth several millions of dollars and for Wangari, ...
www.postnewsline.com/2004/12/strongmeet_prof.html – 51k – Cached
Some even thought that he would win the noble peace prize for his work during … In 1979, Mother Teresa won the Noble Peace prize, Mother Teresa later said …
www.megaessays.com/essay_search/Peace_Prize.html
You are noble and awarded the noble peace prize in the noblest way. We are proud of you. You made us feel like the nation of heroes. History will quote you, ...
www.grameenfoundation.org/ nobel_prize/countryview.php?country=bd – 30k – Cached
A person of immense dignity and noble bearing
When Chief Luthuli was awarded the Noble Peace Prize, it was a fitting and well deserved international tribute. I recall with nostalgia how we went to the …
www.anc.org.za/show.php?doc=ancdocs/ pubs/umrabulo/special-july07/art9.html – 19k – Cached
Offline
A Wikipedia article last year actually had
Dr. Mario Molina: Scientist and Noble Price Winner in Chemistry
(It is likely to have been written by someone whoze first language is Spanish, where z and s are sounded the same.)
I agree with you that the nobility associated especially with the Peace Prize pretty clearly has replaced ol’ Alfred for a lot of people.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-08-13 16:28:14)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline
Peter Forster wrote:
41,600/802 ghits not all of which can be typos:
I agree that the imagery is so compelling, it must be an eggcorn for at least some users. At the same time, it’s an extremely likely and easy-to-make typo. It’s nearly impossible to know which examples are eggcorns and which are typos, but I have to assume that there are some of each out there.
Offline
Peter – I agree with Chad that the imagery is compelling. This noble potential eggcorn might have several cousins because the Nobel Peace Prize always seems to get many more multiplied media moments than all the other Nobel prizes combined. Take the Nobel Prize in Physics, for example;
ughits( Nobel Peace Prize in Physics ) = 39
What’s up with that?
Offline
Take the Nobel Prize in Physics, for example;
ughits( Nobel Peace Prize in Physics ) = 39
What’s up with that?
Well, I’m not sure exactly, but when I googled for “Nobel Prize in Physics,” I got a respectable 325,000 rghits.
Some other Google-related comments. I note that Peter figured the unique hits for “Noble Peace Prize,” but unfortunately I just don’t know a way of getting meaningful unique hits for Google numbers once the raw hits pass a few thousand. After a certain point, using (&start=950) just gets you a number between 700 and 999 that doesn’t seem to mean much of anything. For instance, I just googled “dog” and got over 400 million hits. But once you try to get unique hits, you end up with about 960 hits. Fortunately, Google tells you this—they say that they’re showing you 960 of 400 million hits, so if you know what to look for you can tell that you’re not getting an accurate count of unique hits. There are occasional exceptions to this pattern—where lots of links are involved on high-profile websites, I’ve occasionally seen up to 50000 raw hits get reduced to a few hundred genuine unique hits. But that doesn’t happen really often.
Maybe Roger or some other IT professional on the forum knows more about dealing with Google hits in a way that will produce more useful unique hits—there may be tricks I don’t know about.
Also, more general Google weirdness. When I googled “noble peace prize,” I got 20,200 raw hits—half Peter’s numbers. Here’s the URL for comparison: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2 … tnG=Search
Maybe Peter and I did something different I haven’t noticed (it’s not unexpected case sensitivity—I tried that), but I’m increasingly distrustful of big Google numbers in general.
Offline
Apologies to Peter for the thread-jack. The more I contemplate the ‘Noble’ imagery, the more I like it.
Pat – I apologize for being in a hurry and possibly being misleadingly terse. I agree with you about google’s numbers. Fortunately, for our purposes at this forum, the exact number of hits is not as important as the “order of magnitude” (or simply the number of digits) of the estimated hit count. I don’t completely mistrust google’s numbers, its just that I trust google to return a good faith estimate. You may recall the early days of google when their estimated hit count was continuously updated on the screen as new users (like me) would gaze in amazement. In those days, Google didn’t even have a revenue line item in their business plan. I’m guessing they stopped updating their estimates when somebody on their staff eventually realized how much it was costing them and that the vast majority of google users didn’t care that much about the accuracy of the hit count estimates anyway. Without going into too much CS stuff, I think it’s possible for google to improve their hit count estimates, however without the market demand for accuracy and the compute resources that such accuracy would require, it doesn’t seem to me that it’s feasible for google to allocate the necessary resources to return highly accurate hit estimates. That being said, I think it’s possible for google to somewhat improve their estimating process at a nominal cost, but it’s an extremely complex problem to determine exactly where a compromise between resource allocation and demand pay-back would be in terms of their newer and more financially aggressive business model.
Google aside, my excessive brevity obscured my point that I think there might be eggcorn potential in the phrase “Nobel Peace Prize in …” from the acorn “Nobel Prize in …” Your correctly noted (thanks for taking the time to google and include the link) hit count compared to mine follows:
rghits ( “Nobel Prize in Physics†) = 325,000 (by rghits, I assume you mean ‘regular’ google hits).
ughits ( “Nobel Peace Prize in Physics†) = 39 (by ughits, I assume I mean ‘unique’ google hits).
I think that the word ‘Peace’ sneaks into the picture because of the overwhelming press coverage and political connotations. I poked around a little bit and found found several more that form a small class of potential eggcorns: Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine, Nobel Peace Prize in Economics, Nobel Peace Prize in Chemistry, and so on. So, I’ll take the liberty to list the potential eggcorn class is as follows:
“Nobel Peace Prize in <field>” << “Nobel Prize in <field>”
(where <field> is one of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Economics, etc.; but not Math)
I didn’t check, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a Nobel Peace Prize in Peace out there lurking in the electronic ether. (There will be at least one such hit within a few days after google crawls through this posting).
Way off topic: Has anyone used the new hakia search engine? It doesn’t estimate total web hits and returns at most only two hundred links or so, but the early links usually have higher relevance for my seemingly mindless searches than google’s early links do. Hakia.com (I think they should definitely loose the hacker-like name) refers to itself as a “new semantic search engine,” what ever that means. I’d include the link, but I just this morning praised Chris for being a good spam cop among other things.
Offline
“Noble prize” was noted in 2006 by Ken Lakritz in the commentary section of the Eggcorn Database: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/contribute/#comment-543
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline