Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I just finished William Lyon Phelps’s 1000-page Autobiography. Lots of great stories in it. Readers of this Forum might enjoy this one (from p. 181). It is only a typo, but a potent one:
Perhaps the most fascinating typographical error I ever heard of was described, curiously enough, by Herbert Spencer. A devout Christian woman wrote a book upholding self-sacrifice and toward its close came this sentence. “Pour bien comprendre l’amour, il faut sortir de soi.” In the irrevocable book it appeared thus: “Pour bien comprendre l’amour, il faut sortir le soir.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Wonder if the “printer’s devil†intervened? (“There’ll be the devil to pay,†as Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem had it.) Like the “Wicked Bible†that left the word “not†out of the sixth (or is it the seventh) commandment.
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Also I hesitate over the classification of the error as “only a typoâ€. There are two changes in the spelling, “de soi†to “le soirâ€, one an addition of a letter and the other a substitution. Neither one involves adjacent or even nearby keys on an azerty (or a qwerty) keyboard. It looks more like the substitution of one standard phrase for another which sounds very similar and (sort of) might be expected in the context. That is nearer to a malaprop, or even an eggcorn, than to a fingerslip typo. Of course, some use “typo†more widely to mean something like “a mistake that makes it into printâ€, which this of course is.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2021-03-22 08:26:36)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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