Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I’ve been reading Jennifer Raff’s new book on ancient human DNA, Origins. Last night I came across the line in it “These claims were denigraded by….” Odd, I thought, to see such a bald-faced misspelling in a book from a good publisher. It should have been “denigrated.”
The confusion about the spelling of “denigrate” seems to be a common error. You can see hundreds of examples of this misspelling here. According to Google Ngram, the error happens about 1/10 of one percent of the time (there is an odd peak for this error about 1980, for which I have no explanation).
The more I pondered this, the more I thought this must be an eggcorn, or at least a blidiom. People seem to be blending “degrade” with “denigrate.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Downgrade too?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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fwiw
Prior to its buyout, Beatrice faced sagging profits, downigraded debt, anid rumors of possible takeover.
Still, a loan can be downigraded-say, by one notch-to account for the impairment of related loans.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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