Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
At a brunch yesterday I heard the term “missed carriage” for “miscarriage.”
Seems to be a common substitution: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22missed+carriage%22
The simplest explanation may be an expansion of “mis-” into “missed,” with “carriage” retaining its it’s basal meaning of “an act of carrying.” But I wonder if something more might be happening. Could the eggcorn be motivated by a backstory about how losing a fetus makes a person miss out on the whole baby experience, including such paraphernalia as baby carriages?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Or that “the whole baby experience” and in fact the raising of the child, may be seen as a sort of journey? If so, missing the carriage might mean losing the possibility of going on that journey. It would be much the same as “missing the boat/train/bus”.
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“Miscarriage” does feel like an old-fashioned term which might well date back to the times when carriages were a normal mode of transportation. Nowadays we would tend to call it a spontaneous abortion or something like that.
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I haven’t managed to convince myself.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2024-08-28 01:33:25)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Interesting. If delivery (carriage again) is the target, then clearly the target has been missed. Here’s a variant that must be a typo as that sibilant is impossible to miss.
I haven’t had a midcarriage..but I had zero pregnancy symptoms with my first.
Edelstein was confirmed medically infertile after a midcarriage.
And yet midwives and midwifery suddenly loom into view too.
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Midcarriage—a fetus lost in the middle of a carry.
I had not given any thought to the etymology of midwife. She is the one “with” (the Germanic “mit”) the wife.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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