Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
We lumberjacks up here in the boreal forest know that hewing to the line means keeping your saw close to the mark set out for it. Politicians of whatever stripe are called upon to maintain their party colours. If you’ve never hewn to a line you might be forgiven for thinking it refers to your tint along the spectrum that was largely red to blue, but now includes green.
Even as Texas’s smart-on-crime approach is starting to show success, Governor Perry hues to the party orthodoxy that favors government strangulation over strategic investment.
Political comment
On the controversial stance congressional Democrats have taken with pushing an Employment Non-Discrimination Act stripped of gender identity protections, Speier hues to the party line.
Political comment
Surprisingly, the pannonian petty-patriot mentality is so pervasive that even the expat “diaspora†hues to the party line Fidesz exports via its embassies, consulates and “cultural†stunts.
comment
The governor is the president’s man; he hues to the line dictated from Mexico City or jeopardizes his position.
Political history
While everyone at the very top still hues to the line that Greece should stay in the Eurozone, out of the other side of the mouth comes _but_—
Business politics
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Just a misspelling, perhaps?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I definitely see it as a misspelling, because “hew” is not a very common word, so people don’t know what the verb in the phrase means.
“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin
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Agreed, it is a misspelling. Again, the question is, what kind of a misspelling. It is probably not a fingerslip typo. It is almost certainly “spelling it how it soundsâ€. It is likely (though by no means certain) that, as you suggest, Bruce, those spelling it so have lost the imagery of chopping that warranted the usage of hew in this phrase. If they have also added the imagery of color that is associated with the spelling hue and have figured out a fairly rational way that that fits into the meaning of the whole phrase, we have an eggcorn. If they are just spelling it hue but have no idea what that means, we don’t.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2019-09-24 23:04:19)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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People don’t think about what they say and write, and even less about how to spell it. Expressions like “tow the line” and “low and behold” seem to me not to be reshapings at all, but just the way people write these days. Spelling is returning to Chaucer’s time when you wrote a word the way it sounded to you.
“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin
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