Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Just noticed an interesting little structural ambivalence I don’t remember seeing before. Not an eggcorn, of course, but that same sense of two ways to take the same thing is central to eggcorns as well.
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A package of ground coffee advertises (in all caps, of course) that it “MAKES UP TO 113 CUPSâ€. Of course, “up to n measureNsâ€, meaning “as many as n Ns†is a very well established structure in English, but so is “makes up (in)to Nâ€, and it struck me the second way first: this package, if all goes well, does indeed make up to be 113 cups of coffee. Hmm.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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So the issue is whether “up” is part of the phrasal verb “makes up” or the two-word preposition “up to.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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