Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
The Real Academia Española periodically inducts (induces?) new words into the official canon of Spanish, to the horror of some and the pleasure of others.
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Among a recent crop is one we might suspect of being an eggcorn. Vagabundo means vagabond, and is probably about as analyzable as vagabond in English, though Spanish does have a verb vaga® which means to wander. The newly accepted form is vagamundo , which substitutes mundo “world†for the last two syllables. The syntactic form works very well too, with vaga-mundo coming out equivalent to “world wanderer†(c.f. trota-mundo(s) “globe-trotterâ€.
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It might well have been eggcornish in origin: on the other hand it might have been a conscious pun. And of course once you’ve become widespread enough to be accepted by the RAE, you have left eggcorn territory and wandered into the world of folk-etymology or something of that sort.
[9. Vagamundo. Por su composición (vagar + mundo), podrÃa parecer que es una palabra más lógica que la archiconocida vagabundo, pero frente a su predecesora la RAE la ha considerado en este caso como vulgarismo.
= “Vagamundo. By its composition (wander + world), it might appear that this is a more logical word than the arch-wellknown word vagabond, but given the contrast to its predecessor, the RAE has considered it in this case to be a vulgarism.†]
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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My memory and my technique are failing me. Kem and I had discussed this one before , and I should have found that discussion if I would of had looked, like as I ought to have did.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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One of the pleasures of maturity is being able to quote yourself instead of others. A kind of self-plagiarism.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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kem wrote:
One of the pleasures of maturity is being able to quote yourself instead of others. A kind of self-plagiarism.
I invented the word plagiarism, you know. ;)
“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin
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Somebody ought to destacar (how do you say that in English? bring to prominence? emphasize till people finally see it?) in the public mind the fact that 99.9% of the words you ever use are plagiarized, and the vast majority of the phrases as well, and virtually all of the grammatical constructions. You can’t talk, or write, without doing it, and without many others having done it before you.
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A colleague of mine used to say, relative to developing indigenous literatures in the world’s languages, it pays to copy and calque freely: “plagiarism promotes progressâ€.
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Yes, there comes a point where using somebody else’s coinage without giving credit is reprehensible, but it is a much more complicated issue than many think. Often the important point is whether a word, phrase, sentence, anecdote etc. is right or wise or true or helpful or funny or fitting for a new context, and much less who gets the credit for having come up with it.
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(End rant.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2017-08-30 04:37:59)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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