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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Good Evening,
My cousin strikes again! As we were heading to dinner this evening she said, “Oh, boy, I haven’t had a bite to eat all day. I’m ravishingly hungry!”
“Ravishingly” hungry? I do believe she was looking for “ravenously”. I’m not sure if it’s a true eggcorn, but it made MY evening :)
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Also likely ravening : “(of a ferocious wild animal) extremely hungry and hunting for prey.†( Raveningly hungry surprised me by being rather rare on the Internet. I am sure I use it, as well as ravenously hungry . )
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This is relevant.
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Ravage is also mixed up with ravishing and ravening somewhere. Ravagingly hungry would be hungry enough to savagely ravage the food, I suppose. It showed up a bit more commonly on Google than raveningly hungry .
When I get ravagingly hungry, I’ll chug a glass of water. If that doesn’t help, I’ll eat a couple baby carrots and hummus dip.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2015-11-24 20:41:24)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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When I mentioned this usage to a friend who’s an English language professor, she responded with, “so close; but not quite”. Ravening, raveningly, ravishing, ravishingly; I suppose it’s the combo of r + a + v + e/i + n/s and on and on. Perhaps it’s simply easy to mishear things…
Then there’s this:
http://www.ravishinghunger.com/
One online dictionary defines “ravishing” as “extremely beautiful or attractive; enchanting; entrancing”. So, I it seems you could refer to “ravishing hunger”, but I would think that that’s not a very common usage. But, I could be wrong!
Last edited by Dangat (2015-11-24 20:56:30)
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The older meaning of ravish (‘rape’ in many contexts) was much closer to ravage. A loved one’s beauty was thought of as forcibly overthrowing or making off with one’s heart. (“Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse: thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck’ is from Song of Solomon 4.9 in the King James version. Modern versions are more likely to say something like ‘stolen my heart’ or ‘robbed me of my heart’.) This is pretty surely where the notion of ravishing as extremely beautiful or attractive comes from. To be sure, this latter meaning is the one most prominent and therefore first thought of in many modern speakers’ minds.
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(We like violent metaphors for beauty: striking, stunning, a knock-out, a man-slayer, …)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2015-11-24 21:04:26)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Dangat wrote:
I’m not sure if it’s a true eggcorn, but it made MY evening :)
We be of one blood, thou and I, brother! (I love to find someone else, which in this case includes pretty much all of you here, who gets the kind of pleasure I do from these crazy things.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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