Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
From a local events list that I receive:
Film Night: Angry Ink, a 44 minute film by Inuk outraged at the objections to using seals for subsistence of her people. Does she convince you?For my part, cultural genocide by people (us) who torture animals unmercifully on an industrial scale, and then generate major environmental problems with the unused “waste†should work harder on pulling the moat out of our eyes before dumping on marginal groups
The backdrop to this is, of course, the dominical caution in the Sermon on the Mount:
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? (KJ version)
about hasty judgement.
The eye-irritating objects have been switched. What the writer should have said was “pulling the beam out of our eyes.” But if you are going to switch the two objects, replacing the tiny “mote” with a big “moat” restores the sense. Sort of a controcorn.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Even though a moat is big, I have a hard time imagining how one could be in someone’s eye. Would the eye be the island, doubtless with a castle in the center, and the tears surrounding it the water in the moat, with the eyelids being the far bank of the moat?
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If those who wrote this were actually thinking of a moat (and indeed, if you are totally unused to the word “mote†= ‘speck’, what else would you think of?) it would indeed be an eggcorn of sorts. But it still might be a misspelling, with people thinking something like ‘speck’ is one more meaning attached to the orthographic form “moatâ€. As you point out, that would leave the switching of the mote and beam to deal with, but that is a fairly common sort of thing too.
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All in all, entertaining, even if not an eggcorn.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I agree, David, “moat” for “mote” would be an orthographical (orthogaffical?) error in almost every context. This context, though, seems to call on the semantics of “moat” in order to complete the sense. And so it may be evidence of a lurking eggcorn behind some of the substitutions.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Pulling the moat out of our eyes is kind of opposite to pulling the wool over them, is it not? I wonder if that idiom, in its constructional shape and reference to pulling if not in any connection to moats/motes, is involved.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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