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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Blaring and glaring are both insistent ways of impinging on one’s consciousness, demanding one’s attention, one aural and the other visual. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they are occasionally used for each other:
It was hard to find a place where there wasn’t a light blaring at you.
Loudspeakers glaring in the middle of the night
The films content can stand on its own two legs without us needing to hear overly dramatic music glaring in our ears.
(I wonder if the bleary vision that can result from a light glaring in your eyes may be involved. But maybe not.)
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Glar(ing) is commonly used to describe something inanimate that is obvious in neither an aural nor a visual way, such as an error. Where blare is used with such a meaning it seems eggcornish. It seems standard for a few, and has appeared in published work:
It was blaringly obvious
This is very clear cut and a blaring violation of U.S. election law.
Elizabeth’s well-intentioned suggestion gave him such a blaring realisation of his particular neglect of his most quiet and least social daughter, that he could only nod weakly in reply.
There was a curious, blaring omission in both the headlines and the stories from these supposedly objective outlets
Only I noticed a blaring mistake. Instead of “perserverance,†they’d written “perseverance.†Of course, they meant stick-to-it-ive-ness.
(That last one is rather ironical, but such errors persist.)
*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 asked my teenaged grandsons if they or their friends would talk about a light blaring at them. One of them said he thought it was a clever way to speak. When I asked, he explained that a glare is something you can ignore, simply by looking away, but a blaring noise cannot be shut out so easily. Thus a blaring light would be one so bright and persistent that you couldn’t get away from it.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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“Glaring” belongs to a visual context, “blaring” to an audial. The adjective “glaring” and the adverb “glaringly” made a metaphorical leap to a conceptual context, starting in the seventeenth century (e.g.,”a glaring omission”). “Blaring” and “blaringly” are now making the same metaphorical leap. The question is whether the metaphorical use of “glaring” is somehow licensing the metaphorical transition of “blaring.”
I suspect it is.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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