Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
It looks like a spelling mistake of some kind, quite likely spellchecker-aided. There seem to be a lot of Asian (Indian mostly) sites sporting it; maybe it is achieving some degree of currency there. People who have mostly or only seen it written could make and accept the mistake more easily, I think. Who knows how they would pronounce it? (ASH-tray and a-SHTRAY being two main contenders, of course.) I haven’t thought of any really plausible eggcornish motivation, though I suppose going ashtray could be similar to winding up on the dust-heap of life.
if things go ashtray, there is still hope for the child during later development
I think, deep within, you are a good person. You just went ashtray.
Did things have to be this way. Thing weren’t meant to be easy. He was just another boy. Too late he just went ashtray.
traffic problems go ashtray in metropolitan cities due to the increase in vehicles. The urban roads cannot be widened
Never let your idea go ashtray. This is one of the noblest reasons for sharing your knowledge and experience on a specialized topic.
(Hence this post, I suppose?)
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Go ashtray winds up meaning much the same as go haywall and go haywire , I guess, and if you are led ashtray perhaps you go hogwire . After all:
Metaphors can foster understanding of a new system, or lead us ashtray. They are powerfully transmitting a mental model, but that model has its limitations.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-10-22 08:23:05)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Thinking of people learning this word by reading rather than hearing it, and mispronouncing it in the process, reminds me of my own surprise when I realized that the word I had been pronouncing in my head (and possibly out loud) as AW-ry was really a-RYE. My instincts had led me ashtray, I guess.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-08-03 20:02:45)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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The title alone instantly brought to mind Sean Connery’s Bond. If Indians are picking up some of their English from Bond films they are bound to be led astray, go awry and gang aft a-gley in following the Commander’s slushing Scots sibilants as he strives to subdue SMERSH while seducing the lassies, swallowing Martinis – shaken, not shtirred – and searching for some receptacle in which to extinguish his Senior Service cigarettes.
Eggcorn? Given the often fanatical disapproval of all aspects of tobacco usage these days, merely going astray seems relatively moderate. I’d like it to be an eggcorn but it does seem unlikely.
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re ganging aft agley, I always assumed, with no particular evidence, that “aft” was a variant of “oft”. Is that right? (I could check the Internet, of course, but having an expert handy is even better.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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No expertise here I’m afraid, but as is aften if not invariably the case your surmise is spot on.
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Just re-read this, and am left with the powerful image of plans, so ripped up by the plowshare of time or fate or whatever as to lose the ordered, level smoothness with which they had been so well laid, now in the wake of and after the fact of that disastrous math, lying all AWry, sprawled agley in the dirt. Sic transit ordo mundi, and all that.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2024-05-25 14:01:25)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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