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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
the married couple could not but be overjoyed by the impeding union of their sister and close friend.
the impeding birth of your first child
he wrote a note to his father, to whom he communicated both his sister’s improvement and their
consequent impeding return in the appointed two days time.
she warned of an impeding call by a gentleman
Texas nationalists keeping close tabs on impeding ‘Brexit’ vote
In ancient times, stars were assumed to predict impeding events including bad events.
To date, seismic investigations have failed to yield a reliable method of predicting the time, location, and magnitude of
impeding events.
It’s an easy typo to omit the n . (Less clearly so to insert one, but still not outside the realm of possibility. end is a very common and easily activated sequence: a kind of “finger malapropism†that need have nothing to do with meaning and is in that way more of a typo than anything near to an eggcorn.)
Notwithstanding, most impending events are negative (the word sounds rather ominous, actually), and negative events often impede desired ones. (Note that in several examples above, however, a positive event is anticipated, which heightens the “jolt†produced by the usage.)
Austerity is impending the economy, say the Keynesians
This may be the biggest factor so far that is impending us from being up to date or at least close to that
insulting [each other] is impending us from understanding each other.
One channel member perceives another channel member(s) to be engaged in behavior that is preventing or impending him
from achieving his goals.
Impending events are, probably by definition or at least without exception, events that will affect those w.r.t. whom they are impending. And impeding is a very common kind of negative affecting.
(Pretty pedestrian stuff, but I think it’s eggcornish in both directions. It is reasonably common, certainly.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2017-06-03 15:53:25)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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It certainly may be an eggcorn in some cases, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch, partly because of the pronunciation difference, and partly because I don’t see “impending” as being any more likely to refer to bad things than good. Presumably a typo in most if not all cases.
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Seems like a good eggcorn (or flounder) to me. “Impending” has a negative ring in my lect. If you do an ngram search for words that follow “impending,” you’ll find that it has the same connotation for other authors. Ngram here
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Re the pronunciation difference you mention, Dixon, this is probably, for many people, more a part of written vocabulary than spoken vocabulary. A lot of eggcorns are probably based as much on visual as on auditory/articulatory similarity.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Kem, I accept your evidence re: the negative associations with “impending”. And upon further consideration, I realize that this is consistent with my experience of the usage of that word.
David, I would agree that impeding << >> impending makes more sense as an eyecorn than as an earcorn. There are many ‘corns for which this is true.
Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2017-06-10 05:18:25)
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