Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I wold guess it’s because he learned the word by reading it. On the radio this morning, I heard a man pronounce placate as if it were placket (to rhyme with jacket). At first, I didn’t even know what he had said, but the context made it clear.
Bruce
“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin
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Just heard somebody on TV saying someone had “metted out justiceâ€, pronouncing mete like met rather than like meat . Of course it’s out there on the Internet:
How a community metted out justice on accused persons without a “primafasieâ€.
Watch the treatment metted out on female cadet at the NDA
the treatment metted out to me by the powers that be.
weighing equity out for them, in balances tolerably adjusted, where they themselves are not interested ; metting out integrity, propriety and moral rectitude for them, in measures of pretty good standard capacity,
The author of that last example (somebody named Alexander Watson, from 1821) probably (given the context) knew the word mete with the meaning “measureâ€. Most people nowadays do not. (The King James Version of Mat 7.2 was pretty widely known in those days: “with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you againâ€. If the saying is known at all nowadays it is likely to be in another version.)
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Eggcorning possibilities? I think there are some. What is meted out presumably meets (and has met) a proper standard, and thus it is meet that it be imposed.
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In any case, this is something that people read and pretty much understand (they surely realize that meting or metting out punishment is giving it to the object, i.e. punishing him or her), but they mispronounce it in their minds and thus in speech. To that extent it belongs in this thread.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2018-03-19 10:57:57)
*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 was shocked to not find any discussion of the mispronunciation of infrared in this most monstrous of threads, or in the site as a whole. Ah, well … confession time again.
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As a child, and perhaps into college or so, I remember pronouncing it with two syllables, [ɪn’frerd] and wondering what one did to infrare rays. I know other people who confess to the same thing. As far as understanding, I knew it was a special kind of radiation, but not very clearly what the nature of the specialness was: I did know these rays heated things even though you couldn’t see them. I remember the almost blinding realization, “Oh, it is the opposite of ultra-violet ; radiation too slow rather than too fast to be visible. And yet I can still see the spelt word as properly pronounced in the two-syllable version.
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I still do not understand why the spelling with a hyphen, infra-red , is not more standard.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2019-06-21 21:33:47)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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A friend of mine recently mentioned “hog rotten potatoes” being a staple of her childhood. That was how she and her sibs understood “au gratin potatoes.”
She has company: https://www.google.com/search?biw=1108& … PsZmlaA&q=“hog+rotten”+potatoes&oq=”hog+rotten”+potatoes
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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kem wrote:
A friend of mine recently mentioned “hog rotten potatoes” being a staple of her childhood. That was how she and her sibs understood “au gratin potatoes.”
When I was a youngster, I didn’t like au gratin potatoes and I called them “ugh rotten potatoes”, but that was a pun, not an eggcorn.
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kem wrote:
A friend of mine recently mentioned “hog rotten potatoes” being a staple of her childhood. That was how she and her sibs understood “au gratin potatoes.” ¶ She has company:
This is not something she read and understood but mispronounced, rather something she heard pronounced and misanalyzed in (what was for her) a meaningful way. In other words, a nice eggcorn.
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Au gratin is in some ways like a reverse Lehmann’s term (aunty-Lehmann or whatever terminology we sort of settled on): the phrase is used only as a name for one particular kind of potatoes, at least in my dialect, and for many of us, since we know no French, it is as opaque as a proper name; we can only guess at what the three syllables might mean.
*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 would not call this an Aunty Lehman because Lehmans and Aunty Lehmans pervert proper names (Tajma Hall, Mister Griver Bridge, Penny Annie) and I don’t think of “au gratin potatoes” as a proper name.
There are some fuzzy boundaries, however, in the distinction between proper nouns and common nouns. It really is an odd distinction, when you think about it. And it is a distinction that is perhaps more important to English speakers than speakers in other languages because we have orthography rules and rules of syntax and even semantic conventions that depend on knowing the differnce.
I doubt whether any of us would mainting that “mashed potatoes” is a proper name. The reason that “au gratin potatoes” seems like a proper name is that it has a foreign term as the modifier and it is, as David says, much more opaque to those who don’t know the source language. For all most English speakers know, Augratin could be someone’s last name.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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