Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I believe this originated as a blooper, but it has become somewhat standard in my family, especially since my brother Tim liked (and I don’t doubt still likes) to use it:
[It’s] six of a dozen, and half of one of the other.
This is not an eggcorn, but it is eggcorn-like in that it was (originally) inadvertent, and in that it makes sense. After twisting itself into a knot, the meaning comes out to 50% either way.
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It is especially relevant to the subset of eggcorns that involve metathesis.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Very eggcorn-like. If you think of it all as one phrase-word, written with dashes (“six-of-a-dozen-and-half-of-the-other”) it is arguably a very long eggcorn.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Are eggcorns by definition one-word things? I hadn’t thought so.
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For me the major lack for full eggcorn-hood would be somebody for whom it was standard as such, without the realization that it was a perversion of the more standard phrase (six-of-one-and-half-a-dozen-of-the-other). Its standardness in my family is definitely built on the appreciation and enjoyment of that perversion.
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I think the original error (if in fact it wasn’t an invention) was a one-off error, not standard for anybody who didn’t see it as a joke.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2018-10-25 11:16:24)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Eggcorns can be multiword, yes. But they aren’t usually this long. (The only other one I can think of that approaches this size is “360-degree-turn,” which is several syllable shorter)
Agree, the problem is finding someone who doesn’t say this tongue-in-cheek. I can find two examples on the web where the pun is explicit. But here are two that could be eggcorn examples:
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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“Great minds think a lot” is a multiword eggcorn, I think.
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To be that long an eggcorn has to derive from a lexical item (fixed structure, standard collocation, what have you) that is that long. Many if not most “normal†phrases are at least partially assembled de novo rather than retrieved whole from memory, but memorized, repeated phrases are not uncommon either, and what is memorized for one person may not be for another. It was Ronald W. Langacker who once said “Our vaunted linguistic creativity often reduces to stringing a couple of clichés together to make a sentence.†Any such cliché can be eggcorned, and some of them are fairly long.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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