Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I had never seen this before, but someone in our prayer group asked us to pray for a kid who had a grand maul seizure in school.
I googled, and lo and behold! Many grand maul seizures!
Eggcorn? Or no?
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If you buy that the speakers have an image of a grand mauling of sorts, in which the person is somehow mauled by the seizure, I’d say okay, but I think that’s doubtful. They are just substituting a more common word for a less common one, and I’d say it’s just a malapropism, not an eggcorn.
“Let’s not get bogged down in semantics.”—Homer Simpson to Gary Coleman
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Grand maul candidate: “From there I went into a tonic-clonic grand maul seizure lasting between 3 and 5 minutes. My second seizure I fractured and dislocated my left shoulder, ...” I got just over 700 “grand maul seizure” hits compared to 138K “grand mal seizure” hits.
Grand daddy of all seizures? For a slightly different twist, I googled “grandma seizure” and got 91 hits. 52 seemed to be unintentional malapropisms describing actual serious seizure events. 39 seemed to be deliberate humor, for example; an elderly woman throwing a fit. Any eggcorn potential here?
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Folks were skeptical back in the day. “Grand maul” strikes me as an excellent eggcorn.
his brain will bleed at random times, causing him to go into grand-maul seizures
Medical forum
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Just documented this wonderful eggcorn again, twice, from two consecutive emails:
[name] just told me that [name] just had a grand maul seizure.
[name] had a grand maul seizure about an hour ago. She has never had one before. She is past it now, groggy, and resting.
You would feel hammered or clobbered after one of those.
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Its being repeated points to its being at least somewhat standard for the perp (a good friend of mine).
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2018-09-07 17:03:07)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Grand mall , perhaps unsurprisingly, occurs, in its thousands:
For tonic-clonic (grand mall seizure: ./ Protect head ./ Keep airway open/watch breathing ./ Turn child on side. A Seizure is generally considered an. Emergency
If this is not part of the service you or your loved one runs the risk of an alcohol withdrawal grand mall seizure which can result in brain damage,
Jim had a Near-Death Experience back in 1997 as he suffered a grand mall seizure. He was a therapist and rehabilitation counselor,
and so forth.
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Eggcorn potential? The only image I get is of a very public event, with crowds of shoppers looking on as the poor guy has an attack, but it doesn’t seem very probable to me that those spelling the phrase this way have such a notion in mind.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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As I often say about other proposed eggcorns, I see “grand mall” as just a misspelling. The points about “grand maul” make it a much more solid candidate, as I see it.
“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin
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Agreed.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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