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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
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Seen on the web today : “The Obama Administration has taken its duplicity to sights unseen, revealing that Iran never actually signed the infamous nuclear deal. In a letter to Rep. Mike Pompeo (R. Kan.), the State Department confessed that the deal is not even “legally binding.â€
Bi-lingual English / French amateur etymologist and all-round pedant
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Taken to sights unseen ! It is indeed a notable goof. Tautology? Hardly. Self-contradiction, more like. (Sort of like “That’s the most unheard of thing I ever heard of.†Sights are constituted as such by being seen, are they not? But the notion of sights hitherto unseen is natural enough, or of sights worthy of the name should they be seen.) Is the word sites in there; did the perp mean to places never before seen ? Blending/bending of “heights unseen?/unknownâ€? Probably. (Reverberations of Shakespeare: “Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be takenâ€?). Clearly the perp considers the administration’s advocacy of the Iran deal to be the height of duplicity. “(Buying) sight unseenâ€, a pig in a poke? It certainly fits the general situation, but not the immediate context very well. Buying sight unseen is gullibility, not duplicity.
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But, eggcorn? Not so clearly to me. The “unknown places†notion (whether or not mediated by the meaning ‘sites’) heads in the right direction, perhaps. Maybe if the duplicity was in selling the deal sight unseen to the gullible us/US?
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It seems to me the perp was shooting for “taking duplicity to levels (= heights) never before seen†and mixed in several other clicheÌs, some of which were doubtless primed because they would have fit in a different part of the scenario he was envisioning. (The scene/sight seen in his mind.) One way or another, he has the Obama Administration squarely in his sights, just his English usage has drifted a bit out of the line of fire.
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In any case, a great catch. Very entertaining.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2015-11-27 11:49:26)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Seems to me that this is an attempt to give an idiom a meaning it does not have.
This happens quite a bit, doesn’t it? If we forget. for example, that “beg the question” refers to the old logical fallacy of assuming what we set out to prove, we can easily start thinking (as many do) that the phrase “begging the question” means “raising the issue†rather than “avoiding the issue.†If we want to use the idiom “the exception proves the rule” in a way that respects its etymological roots, we should probably avoid the phrase—almost no one uses it in its original sense (something like “the need to state what the rule doesn’t cover lends authority to the rule on matters that it actually does cover.â€) “A sight for sore eyes,” traditionally a compliment, is given a negative twist by many younger speakers. They use it to tag sights that are ugly or disgusting.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Agreed, the effect is “to give an idiom a meaning that it doesn’t have.†Which idiom, though?
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Also, the meanings people give the idioms in the other cases make (eggcornical) sense, generally. Begging the question, in the modern sense, is begging for, to the point of demanding, an answer to (or at least a discussion of) the question. “The exception proves the rule†is perfectly ‘literal’: “prove†no longer means ‘test’ but rather ‘(test and) show to be valid’. An ugly or disgusting sight is ‘for’ sore eyes in the sense that it causes them, rather than alleviating their soreness.
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“Taking duplicity to sights unseen†doesn’t do it so well.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2015-11-27 11:40:18)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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