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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
A shirt-tail relative (a daughter-in-law’s sister, who happens to be a teacher) tonight used the word soothe-sayer , pronounced quite matter-of-factly with the voiced th(e) , with the contextual meaning “one who tells people what they want to hear, panders to/affirms their prejudices”. When questioned she unhesitatingly said that was the sort of thing she had meant, and that was what she was sure the word meant to most people, at least nowadays.
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This seems a pretty clear eggcorn, but it involves a change of meaning of the compound as well as of its first component. A sooth-sayer is a pretend prophet, one who claims knowledge (claiming to speak “sooth” in the sense “truth/reality”, forsooth, meseemeth) but usually if not always falsely. Often the message might be disturbing, riling people up rather than soothing them. The falsehood is not denoted by the sooth component, but comes in with the compound word to deny or contradict the meaning of the component. ( So sayer is an interesting variant I had been unaware of.)
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In contrast, a soothe-sayer (probably still spelled “soothsayer”?) would calm people’s riled up sensibilities, offering a rest bit from, or some soft soak for, their anxieties and anger, perhaps saying to them
There, there rather than here, here . Again, the message will often be false in some degree, in emphasis if not in content, because the important criterion is not truth but comfort. (The teachers heaped up by those with “itching ears” in 1 Timothy 4 come to mind, who will help people “turn away their minds from the truth”.) But the falsehood in this case seems secondary to the idea: if the truth is soothing a soothe-sayer would tell them that. And a soothe-sayer might not particularly dwell on the future at all.
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I didn’t quickly find confirmation of this reading on the Inet, but didn’t look long. Have the rest of you encountered this? Was my d-i-l’s sister right that this is widespread nowadays?
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2024-01-22 00:02:05)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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This reminds me of a deliberate pun found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In Pesher Nahum, the opponents of the authors (usually assumed to be Pharisees) are referred to as doreshei halaqot, “seekers after smooth things,” which is a pun on doreshei halakhot, seekers after halakoth (the body of Jewish oral law).
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Not doreshei halakoth? (If not, how does the kh become k just as the t becomes th, or vice versa?) Are there a lot of k(h)/q minimal pairs to make puns with?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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