Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
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Just watched Blue Origins’ first flight to space with humans onboard—it does look like it would be a lot of fun!— I rarely watch any kind of TV or news video (or whatever it is called nowadays), but I was struck by the scrolling captions. They showed up onscreen several seconds after the speech they were reporting, so perhaps a person was supposed to be checking things before they went up, but the number of spectacular malapropisms was amazing to me. The one I got written down on my palm was ought toss sequence < autosequence , but it was far from the only or even necessarily the best one.
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They were generally entirely on the receptor side, as far as I could tell: it did not seem that the people being quoted misspoke in any way, but that the machine or people trying to interpret what had been said messed up badly. Several times the speaker repeated a phrase, and the interpreter got it right one time and wrong another (not necessarily, but more than once, in that order, which strikes me as mildly unnatural).
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Anyhow, it made me more skeptical about things I find on the Internet. To whatever extent what you find there is machine generated material of this sort, it is very poor evidence for eggcornhood. Auto be tossed, I reckon, if you can figure out how to identify it.
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This of course doesn’t mean legitimate receptor-side eggcorns don’t happen all the time. In fact they are probably almost entirely necessary in order to establish speaker-side eggcorns in the first place.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-04-08 11:00:24)
*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 think I detect an increase in NLP subtitles in films. The technology is (at present) fairly easy to spot.
Another curious subtitle phenomenon is when the subtitles render speech that can’t be (and probably wasn’t meant to be) heard. I assume in this case that the subtitlers are working from a shooting script.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Was just remembering that, years ago, there was a regular contribution in the Piano Technicians’ Guild newspaper (to which my father, a licensed piano technician among many other occupations, subscribed), called the “Rump River Report”. One of its specialties was the humorous names of the characters reported on, such as the snooty high-society lady Mrs. Ben Eaton-Fisch, and the Sheriff, Otto B. Shott.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-04-01 13:07:11)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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