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Chris -- 2018-04-11
“Often the complaint is lobbied that millennials seem to want extraneous congratulation for simply doing their jobs.” From a post at Unfogged (http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2 … tml#015329).
On On,
Paul Woodford
Paul’s Thing
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An interesting eggcorn. There are several instances of it on the web. It also occurs in the active, which is a good sign that it is an eggcorn and not just a misspelling.
Almost everything that we lob is tangible (bombs, grenades, balls, stones). I can’t think of anything metaphorical or ideational that we lob. Except complaints, and even that is rare—“lobbed a complaint” is not a common expression. I wonder: Does “lodge a complaint” figure into the mix? Is it possible that “lob a complaint at” got started as a malapropic version of “lodge a complaint against?” Other things that that we lodge are claims and cases, and both of these are echoed by a few examples of the lob version (i.e., “lob a case,” “lob a claim”).
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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kem wrote:
...”lobbed a complaint” is not a common expression.
Indeed. I’d never seen nor heard it until this thread. I had to infer from the context that the acorn is “lobbed a complaint”. I assume it’s a regional dialectical difference.
I wonder: Does “lodge a complaint” figure into the mix?
Bingo! That’s the one I’m familiar with.
Is it possible that “lob a complaint at” got started as a malapropic version of “lodge a complaint against?”
That would be my guess too, especially since the Google Ngram shows “lodge a complaint” and “lodged a complaint” from about 1760 while not finding “lob a complaint” or “lobbed a complaint” at all.
QUESTION for those of you well-versed in the Ngram: This Ngram page shows a note saying “Search for “lodged a complaint” yielded only one result. Search for “lodge a complaint” yielded only one result”, along with a graph showing varying incidences of both phrases over many years. If they only found one result for each phrase, how can they draw a graph with lines like that? Wouldn’t there only be a single point for each phrase, instead of a line, if they only found one result for each? This has happened to me several times, and I’m puzzled.
Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2018-02-15 02:50:03)
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This Ngram page shows a note saying “Search for “lodged a complaint†yielded only one result.
I’m not seeing this message on your link, Dixon. It would be a strange thing to say: Ngram won’t even graph an expression unless it finds at least 40 examples in its database.
You might want to try using some some of the Ngram tags in your searches. The one I used to look for “lodge a complaint” was “lodge_INF DET complaint” Here is what you get when you graph this expression.
To see the various determiners included in DET, do this search.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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kem wrote:
I’m not seeing this message on your link, Dixon.
Neither am I now! But it was there before, and this has happened to me a number of times with Ngram.
It would be a strange thing to say: Ngram won’t even graph an expression unless it finds at least 40 examples in its database.
I know! That’s why I mentioned it.
You might want to try using some some of the Ngram tags in your searches. The one I used to look for “lodge a complaint” was “lodge_INF DET complaint” Here is what you get when you graph this expression.
To see the various determiners included in DET, do this search.
Thanks for the tips, kem.
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Tonight I heard a guy in a video say “lobbied softballs”, which led me to a number of online examples. I thought I might start a new thread to discuss this eggcorn, but the requisite pre-posting search yielded this old thread that I’ve already weighed in on and forgotten about. Anyway, here are some of the new examples:
justin trudeau says he will not lecture president trump. lobbying soft balls. questions about multiple controversies facing the administration were noticeably absent from the news conference.
news archive
The CNN and FOX NEWS questioning of these losers is to ,say the least, pathetic..there are no issues the mediators DON’T tend to “lobby soft balls” at.
blog
oh, crap, why did I spend 1hr watching Van Susteren*lobby softballs* to Palin?
tweet
Haha, see how it works, anyone can lobby softballs from the bleachers… careful Mark, Careful.
blog
She took 10 hours of Benghazi, she can handle this. Trump isn’t going lobby softballs. Might as well get the practic in.
discussion
For what it’s worth, neither Bill O’Reilly nor Larry King host legitimate news shows, at least by the time-tested standards of lobbying softballs to sympathetic guests.
blog
Even after lobbying softballs, Matt Lauer supposedly presented a problem for posing ONE real question… WTF?
news report
Last edited by Dixon Wragg (2018-02-15 03:40:38)
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My sister reports a friend saying, “I don’t believe we get anywhere by sitting in our corner and lobbying grenades.” Grenades are, prototypically, physical things that can be easily lobbed and in fact that you would most often lob (from a relatively hidden position) rather than throw in order to use. Ken lists them, in the second post above, among the kinds of physical objects we are likely to speak of lobbing.
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Last edited by DavidTuggy (2023-04-24 08:41:33)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Lobbying grenades would indeed be a forceful way to influence someone’s politics.
By the way, “lob a complaint” is not a mere malaprop, is it? Here among us? It strikes me as a logical reimagining of the idiom and thus a proper eggcorn. Like a small, quail eggcorn or something. Still ovoid.
The origin of the delicious word ‘lob’ is apparently the Proto-Germanic *lubb? (“that which hangs or dangles”). In the context, it evokes for me the memory of my friend in elementary school – or was it grade seven? – who spelled them “hang gernades”. I so loved that! Others have the same idea:
I’d roll a hang gernade down the stairs and hide under the bed.
home defense fantasies
They’re hang gernades because they hang by that little lever. Or they hang briefly, innocently in the air. Well, mostly ear spelling I guess.
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Peter Forster wrote:
When it comes to throwing things, lobbing stones for example seems less malicious than hurling, pelting or flinging them. Lobbing suggests a graceful arc, delivered underhand while playing boules perhaps, or a friendly game of tennis. (On the other hand though, I think that grenades may be lobbed more often than flung or pelted?)
While lobbying is usually the action of influencing, persuading, pressurising or even buttonholing by the lapels some politician or decision-maker, threatening with a shower of bricks may be even more effective in the short term.
... and conservative Americans line up to shower encomiums on the enemy dictator while lobbying brickbats at the American President.
This spawned a culture of proto-hooliganism, with “guys lobbying bricks through windows, chasing the girls, coming to school with daggers, with swords.”
Alluding to Doris’ attacks on Sunak, they said it was made “particularly difficult by a certain cabinet minister lobbying bricks on Twitter”...
Al Jazeera reported brawls outside Waterloo train station and counter-protesters lobbying stones at police from the top of nearby bridges.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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There’s something about the -y ending (it’s not quite a suffix, is it?) on words like hurry, worry, scurry, dilly-dally, shilly-shally, nitty-gritty, silly, folly, volley, patty-cake and other better examples that are not coming to mind (later: shimmy, jimmy ), that has some kind of a repetitive, back-and-forth-ishness to it. I think this may be part of what makes lobby such a natural way to refer to lobbing back and forth. I’d almost class it as a kind of frequentative, like -le and -er, but am not sure. Do other examples come to mind for the rest of you?
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But if that repetitive meaning were important, I would have guessed that lobbying softballs would vastly outnumber, like 100 to 1, lobbying a softball (unless of course you lobbied it back and forth several times). But the difference may not be that great. Google gives, at least on the first try, 47 hits for lobbying softballs vs. 4 for lobbying a softball . E.g.
all of this is is this really that big a deal to Senate right now we know and I’m not just lobbying a softball your way.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2023-05-08 00:57:54)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Yes, Tocayo, it’s definitely ovoid for me.
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And I love the “hang gernade”. I immediately saw and still see the thing hanging (pregnantly, as you say) in the air, getting larger in that instant before it descends on me.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2023-04-25 01:03:03)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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My sister just gave me one she heard earlier today:
I’m surprised they’re not lobbying nasty insults at each other.
Fwiw the sentence was referring to some individuals estranged over political allegiances, a context where lobbying is active and often aimed at denigrating one’s opponent and creating conflict.
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Another interesting one:
The main problem with society is nobody listens to each other […Reddit post info…] I am not the one lobbying insults back and forth they are the ones doing that.
If “I” and “they” are the opponents envisioned as “lobbying the insults back and forth” but I am not indulging in the activity, how can they be lobbying back and forth, as opposed to lobbying forth but not back? Or are they now lobbying them at each other within the group of “they” since I will not play their game? Perhaps such lobbying is fertile ground for incoherence.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2024-07-10 14:20:09)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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