Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Following up on the kudos and the cosmos :
I didn’t feel the pathos were any less sincere than the one in Wreck It Ralph or any other recent animated movie.
(A nice double-whammy, where “the one in X†reinforces that this a pluralized count noun.)
Her multiple pathos were plain stupid and uselss. Couldn’t learn anything from them. Just SOOO glad that I’m over with her.
Thus, genuine pathos were given to the character.
Pathos were formed at the very beginning of the article when it said that the No Child Left Behind Act was the most sweeping reform of federal education policy
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The Olympic and Paralympic ethos were celebrated at a series of school assemblies following the Games.
Japanese ethos were not followed by Japanese management personnel, once they are in India.
when under the impact of political upheaval in the rest of the country, the Sikh ethos were transformed
into political yearnings.
I am a cogitative and studious person, with an experienced understanding of many ethos and moral sets.
Bailey not only blatantly contradicts Carson with facts in his piece, but uses many ethos and logos as well in order to aid in his argument.
(This last example probably takes logos as plural also. Of course there are thousands of examples of plural logos meaning graphical/written symbols used to represent a company. I expect there are other logos out there which mean something like “logical principles†(as _ethos_presumably means “ethical principlesâ€), but I haven’t found a good way to sift for them.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2013-08-16 10:13:53)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Another word in the same pattern is mythos. Googling “mythos are” yielded about 520 hits, of which around 60, by my random sampling, seem to be the same sort of usages as those documented by DavidTuggy above for pathos, ethos, and logos. Examples:
The Original Mythos are the original and earliest writings of the Slenderman Mythos.
See if the Pirate Mythos are true!
The two mythos are very distinct from one another.
First off, philosophy majors will be none too happy with how nonsensical the time travel mythos are handled here.
...the Green Lantern mythos are full of great villains that will look great onscreen…
Its mythos are drawn from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Mikado…
The mythos are much like folklore except they are fictional myths written of a vast universe where alien races reside.
That last example is interesting because it includes both “mythos” and “myths”, seemingly as synonyms, though it’s hard to imagine why someone would use two such similar synonyms so close together that they sound redundant.
It’s a little unclear to me whether people are assuming that “mythos” is the plural of the presumed singular “mytho”, or what the hell is going on here.
Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2013-09-03 03:41:25)
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In the news this week:
Matson ships molasses from Hawaii to the mainland about once a week. Molasses are made at Hawaii’s last sugar plantation, run by Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. on Maui.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/tra … e14286163/
Molasses are made in Hawaii than where?
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burred wrote:
Molasses are made in Hawaii than where?
Sounds like a 75-25% (or something on that order) F-M ratio of births (or at least embryos?) in Hawaii.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Molasses is a plural Portuguese word turned into an English singular. But its plural roots exert themselves now and then. The OED says that molasses “was adopted in the plural form, probably because the syrup is made from the uncrystallized leftovers of the raw sugar…. The word is construed as singular, except in southern and central U.S. regional usage, where it is frequently construed as plural.”
Last edited by kem (2013-09-14 17:36:54)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Interesting. The original item was from AP, so the writer was presumably from away. I went looking for “a molasse” and found that the term is used for a rock type made of the crumbs of mountains. Not etymologically related to molasses, believe it or not.
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So molasses from honey (mellifluous sweetness) and Molasse (a particular rock formation in Switzerland, is it not?) from soft flabby flimsiness (mollifying emollients) and neither one from grinding or being ground up (molars milling). Or from apples or other melons. Holy-Moley, Etymology is wonderful.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2019-01-04 12:19:27)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Here’s another one to add to our list:
So I found what looks like a debri of an oil rig underwater but I’m not sure what it really is but whatever
description of a video
A debri on the track causes a yellow flag
photo caption
We all cannot stand the idea of seeing our houses going down like ashes, we all are too attached to our houses to see them turn into a debri hence we need to take requisite actions today…
roofing company website
Yesterday I was about to go on a fall colors shooting spree and, on my way out I decided to take a shot of the weird looking jet trails in the sky and a debri slid down my visor…
photography blog
Clearly, some folks think debris is a plural.
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Don’t you mean “debris are plural�
.
(Nice find!)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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DavidTuggy wrote:
Don’t you mean “debris are plural�
Debris am plural.
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Here’s another one: I was listening to a TED talk on YouTube today and the speaker kept using the word “fraca”. He clearly thought that “fracas” was a plural.
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Excellent find. It might be another case of Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind. In its defence, there are dozens of hits for things like, “He got into several fracas.”
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A kudo for finding “fraca.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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kem wrote:
A kudo for finding “fraca.”
LOL!
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When … the … moon hits yer eye, etc., etc. Today I learned that mores are the plural of a mos. So much for a more.
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David Bird wrote:
When … the … moon hits yer eye, etc., etc. Today I learned that mores are the plural of a mos. So much for a more.
Stop, you’re killin’ me! LOL!!!!!!!!!!!
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A recent languagelog post introduced homo sapien, perhaps sporting a single bicep.
It occurred to me to look for a single len, one of many lens.
I have several lens and filters from an old Ricoh 35 mm and was looking to buy a digital body that would accept the old lens?
http://www.tomsguide.com/answers/id-289 … -lens.html
I’m into bird photography, and am very attracted to the build-in-VR within the 7D body. However, I was told that because the 7D focuses by mechanicaly linking the camera body to the len, it is rather slow-focusing when used with a telephoto len.
https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/1160580
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Another singular/plural oddity is “soap suds.” I am currently playing an addictive word game on my phone that requires me to find as many words as possible in a 4X4 letter matrix. I’ve noticed that the program recognizes “suds” but not “sud.” However, if you check the OED, you’ll find “sud” listed as the singular of “suds.” It may be the shortest listing in the OED. That’s all it says. There are no citations.
But is there really a singular of “soap suds?” While the odd person may have used it this way (“the soap sud popped”), almost all examples of the singular on the web appear to be the adjective rather than the noun (“soap sud enemas”) and the adjective probably loses its final “s” sound for euphonic reasons (the correct term, though a bit harder to say, is “soap suds enema”) On top of all this, the most probably origin of “suds” is a Dutch term (for a bog) that already has the terminal “s” sound in the singular.
My take on this is that “soap suds” is probably one of the English nouns that have no singular. Many of these nouns are uncountable/mass nouns, and “soap suds” seems to fall in this category. What pulls it away from this category is that the mass of soap suds is patently composed of individual bubbles, leading speakers to think that “soap suds” is not a mass noun but the plural of a countable noun.
Last edited by kem (2018-07-15 11:03:03)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Dixon Wragg wrote:
Here’s another one: I was listening to a TED talk on YouTube today and the speaker kept using the word “fraca”. He clearly thought that “fracas” was a plural.
But, since the origin of fracas is French, maybe the speaker was just using a French pronunciation to show off.
“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin
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yanogator wrote:
But, since the origin of fracas is French, maybe the speaker was just using a French pronunciation to show off.
Good theory, but his pronunciation was not otherwise French.
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The British pronunciation is “FRAK-ahh.” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronun … ish/fracas
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I mean, I support it with all of my heart because it is a whole Hefty bag full of bonkers, but I really think it’ll take me a while to wrap my head around it.
movie article
Chock full of bonkers with a complicated world that is steampunky with ghosts and gods and magic and a whole mess of talking cats.
comic book review
Horrible Histories is a fast-paced journey full of bonkers and battling stories from British history.
synopsis
A little hard to tell, but it appears that a few people may construe “bonkers” as plural. I suppose to them a “bonker” must be “a crazy thing”. But it’s also possible that the perps are all using “bonker” as a sort of hip substitute for “bonkers”.
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It’s an interesting, and odd, English pattern that lets -s (which already is so prolific on verbs as a 3rd person present tense marker, and on nouns as a plural or as a possessive) mark adjectives in certain cases. Bonkers is joined by nuts, crackers, and it seems like several others I’m not thinking of at the moment, in exemplifying this pattern. Is it a development from the noun-plural meaning? Nuts can certainly be plural (he is nuts, he is a nut, they are (a bunch of) nuts). A cracker, whether or not from Georgia, is certainly a pluralizable noun, but I am not used to referring to a person who is crackers as a cracker.
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preggers? (That one’s dated, isn’t it? British certainly. Doesn’t British English have several more of these?)
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It feels related in my mind, though I’m not sure why, to the pattern of using a plural noun preceded by “the†to refer to a non-singularizable condition: I’ve got the trots, the runs, (the) measles, the mumps, the willies or the heebie-jeebies, *that gave me a fantod, do the splits, etc. But those are definitely nouns, not adjectives.
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Help me out―which other -s adjectives can you think of? How do they fit in here?
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2018-07-20 12:05:43)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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DavidTuggy wrote:
Help me out―which other -s adjectives can you think of?
Bananas.
How do they fit in here?
Lube and patience.
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But not “he is a bananaâ€. In fact, for me you can’t be bananas but must go it/them, while the other ones meaning “crazy†you can either be or go. Hmm.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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