Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
From Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words :
Commemorative events are being held this year to mark the quincentenary of Utopia , [Sir Thomas More’s] book that brought the word into being. Though More wrote his work in Latin, he took his title from classical Greek ou , not, and topos , place. By derivation, therefore, utopia doesn’t exist. At times the word has been written Eutopia , using the Greek prefix eu -, meaning good, to emphasise the positive aspects of such an imagined society.
Clearly Quinion is describing an eggcorn (a SNOT award candidate, I think).
.
Do we have anybody doing it backwards, e.g. thinking euphemism means ‘something unspoken’ ? (This particular case would not be an easy eggcorn, since euphemisms are in fact spoken or at least expressed, but they are spoken in order to leave something else unspoken, so somebody might construe things that way.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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