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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Found this in http://www.boingboing.net/:
Aussie Institute of Criminology calls piracy losses “self-serving hyperbole”
The Australian Institute of Criminology analyzed the music and software piracy loss-figures for the the Attorney General, and drafted a report that found them to be errant nonsense.
Sounds like an “eggcorn” to me!
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I like this one. The phrase “arrant knave” is a pretty good one to search on, and gives 990 Google hits vs. 506 for “errant knave”.
The dictionary definition of “arrant” references “errant”, so one could make the argument that the word substitution is legitimate, but the definitions are distinct, so I’d argue it’s a legitimate eggcorn. (Seems like too frequent an occurance for a mis-spelling.) In the “arrant/errant knave” phrase you have the contrast between someone who is “a knave to the extreme” vs. someone who is “a wrongly-behaving knave”.
From Merriam-Webster online:
Main Entry: ar·rant
Pronunciation: ‘a-r&nt, ‘er-&nt
Function: adjective
Etymology: alteration of errant
: being notoriously without moderation : EXTREME <we are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us—Shakespeare> – ar·rant·ly adverb
vs.
Main Entry: er·rant
Pronunciation: ‘er-&nt, ‘e-r&nt
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English erraunt, from Anglo-French errant, present participle of errer to err & errer to travel, from Late Latin iterare, from Latin iter road, journey—more at ITINERANT
1 : traveling or given to traveling <an errant knight>
2 a : straying outside the proper path or bounds <an errant calf> b : moving about aimlessly or irregularly <an errant breeze> c : behaving wrongly <an errant child> d : FALLIBLE – errant noun – er·rant·ly adverb
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Searching on “Arrant nonsense” vs. “Errant nonsense” also gets you plenty of hits for each. This time I get 50600 for Arrant and 11900 for Errant.
This also gets you a very nice article from the Taipei Times suggesting that copy editors prefer the “errant nonsense” version, and addressing the issue of whether “Errant” and “Arrant” have developed distinct definitions as I was arguing above. (The article’s author agrees with me and disagrees with the copy editors.)
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Frances – thanks for the link to the William Safire article on “arrant” vs. “errant” – definitely entertaining.
But now I’m gonna go slightly off-topic. One paragraph in that article had me scratching my head at first. Here Safire is ostensibly explaining where the words come from:
Start with the Latin root, iterare, “to travel,” which spawned “itinerant” and “itinerary,” a knight-errant was one who wandered around, clanking in his armor, occasionally helping distressed damsels. Spelled with an e, errant’s meaning remains “aimless, drifting, straying.”
The first problem here is that we seem to have a copy editing problem (in an article about copy editors!): the first sentence is a run-on; it should have a semi-colon or a period after “itinerary.”
The second problem is that the paragraph presents the etymology (etymologies, really) of “errant” rather confusingly. The OED article on “errant” – which I bet was the source of WS’s information – claims that there are three “branches” to the word, and the first and third branches have different etymologies. The first branch is that to which the “errant” of “knight errant” belongs. It’s derived from Vulgar Latin “iterare” – to go on a journey, travel – and it implies someone who spends a lot of time traveling. The third branch is the “errant” of, say, “an errant child.” It’s derived from Latin “errare” – to wander, stray – and implies someone who’s straying from the proper path, someone who’s making errors in their life. The second branch is that of “arrant,” as in “arrant nonsence”; it’s probably derived from one of the other two, or influenced by both, but that’s not clear. What bugs me, though, is that Safire’s use of etymology in that paragraph is essentially pointless; it presents a garbled version of this while making none of it clear. Maybe the copy editors betrayed him….
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It’s interesting how the paths of errant/errant/arrant crossed and recrossed years ago. It’s one of the deep eggcorns that was fell ere it confused any English tongue.
errant (combined from dictionary.com and online ED)
mid-14c., “travelling, roving,” from Anglo-French erraunt, from two Old French words that were confused even before they reached English: 1. Old French errant, present participle of errer, edrer “to travel or wander,” from Late Latin iterare, from Latin iter “journey, way,” from root of ire “to go” (see ion ); 2. Old French errant, past participle of errer (see err ). The senses fused in English 14c., but much of the sense of the latter since has gone with arrant.
But harking back to these roots, I’m interested in the strong possibility that to err can be a hidden eggcorn. Listen to this exchange on an eggcorn thread:
OP (Original Poster): If this is turning in to a thread where we are unreasonable about other people’s language errors, then I want to declare that it annoys me when people use ‘err’ wrong – i.e. because they think it just means to choose one option. Like, they’ll say “which way shall we err?” and then I’ll say “why do we have to ERR at all!!” and I END UP LOOKING LIKE A DICK (justified). The end.
R (Respondant): Always err on the side of caution
OP: exactly
R: It’s a weird expression, actually
I presume it means that, if you discover (with hindsight) that the action chosen was a mistake, better that it was the action which had the least damaging consequences. The way the expression is phrased, though, suggests that at the time of making the decision you should deliberately be making an error. Bizarre.
If that makes sense…
http://drownedinsound.com/community/boa … al/4266817
Well, no, you’re not deliberately making an error, it is as you said, you’re making a decision under uncertainty and so if you make a mistake, better it have the least damaging consequences. The original uses of “err on the side of”, available through the n-grams, referred to erring on the side of mercy, modesty, gentleness, or leniency. A humanitarian precautionary principle. These uses make the sense of the idiom more transparent than does the generic “side of caution.” But I wonder if “to err on the side of” necessarily means misjudgment; why can’t it mean “to decide on the side of”?
It is the opening sentence which betrays “to err” as a potential hidden eggcorn. Its only meaning is taken to be “to be mistaken”. One of the original senses of to err is still active in French, where it means to wander or to travel, and I think of it that way too. The same error, or potential misunderstanding, is also hiding in “errant” as well as in “error”, though probably not in “errand”. That wandering sense of error is also present in science in the concept of experimental or statistical error. These “errors” refer to differences among experimental observations due to random – in other words, unknown – causes. They’ve got nothing to do with procedural mistakes or incompetence. I do remember one of the big names in ecology getting very incensed when I attributed variation in his results to experimental error. “What?! These are good data, there’s no error in our results!” Some people have a Platonic belief in the literal existence of an average. Where is this beast?... It’s hovering out of sight in an ideal, real universe we somehow just can’t touch, though we can see shadows of it on this cave wall and this bar graph. So “errors” for them creep in because we didn’t do a good job measuring.
That’s all I wanted to say. Oh, and that knights errant can be on an errand.
people who saw themselves as a sort of knight errand, with a mission to fulfil
https://books.google.ca/books?id=6BoCyE … 22&f=false
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Moment of illumination. On a whim, I took the trouble to look up the etymology of errand. It hasn’t exchanged genetic material with errant since the hey day of proto-indo-European. That means that errand is a hidden eggcorn for me, and probably others during the last 5 centuries. Check these out:
Old English _ærende_ “message, mission; answer, news, tidings,” a common Germanic word (cognates: Old Saxon arundi, Old Norse erendi, Danish _ærende_, Swedish _ärende_, Old Frisian erende, Old High German arunti “message”), which is of uncertain origin. Compare Old English ar “messenger, servant, herald.” Originally of important missions; meaning “short, simple journey and task” is attested by 1640s. In Old English, _ærendgast_ was “angel,” _ærendraca_ was “ambassador.”
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=errand
From Middle English erande, erende, from Old English _Ç£rende_ (“errand, message; mission; embassy; answer, news, tidings, business, careâ€), from Proto-Germanic * airundijÄ… (“message, errandâ€), perhaps from Proto-Indo-European * ey- (“to goâ€).
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/errand
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