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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The standard phrase—“instilling fear”—gets over 100k hits. It’s harder to measure “install/installing/etc fear” due to a video game called FEAR or F. E. A. R., but I’d guess it gets less than 2k.
Jorkel has documented a lot of phrases like this one, in which the substituted word in a fixed phrase really makes so much sense that it’s hard to say that the new phrase is an “error.” (In my own head, I think of pairs like “install/instill fear,” “bring/ring down the curtain” as “Jorkel pairs.”) And maybe that’s why “install fear” shows up in a lot of upscale cyberneighborhoods—like university and organizational websites.
I kind of like “install fear” because it has an ominous, mechanistic feel that suits well the anti-authoritarian milieus in which it often appears. Examples:
Threatening, installing fear, persecution
http://www.jcu.edu.au/theuni/
Whether it‘s bird flu, mad cow disease, asylum seekers, terrorism, flesh-eating bugs, paedophiles, cancer, crime, germs left, right and centre ready to strike the moment our backs are turned… or even animal rights people and anti-vivisectionists, the reason for our government-directed media’s obsession with installing fear in us has one purpose…control.
http://www.vivisection.info/netcu_watch/nov23_5.htm
Genuine authority does not depend on installing fear in order to make an impact – it relies on something altogether harder to engender in a workforce: respect.
http://www.paconsulting.com/news/by_pa/ … 980528.htm
That the persecution and convictions were about installing fear; to defeat an effective strategy of using the market system, its layers of interconnected boards and officers, investor records, market markers, pink sheets, targeting any business associates from banker down to toilet paper suppliers to disassociate themselves from Huntington.
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2006/12/123363.shtml
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I think “install fear” is a legitimate eggcorn of “instill fear.” The object which follows “install” is usually a concrete item …a person, a regime, an appliance… rather than an abstract concept like fear. I suppose one could “install communism” and the like, but to “install fear” seems a bit inappropriate—at least to my ear; It would seem that to instill fear (in someone), one would have to “install” something other than fear to effect it.
By the way, thanks for honoring my past contribution with the moniker “jorkel pairs.” I’m not sure the term will catch on, but it was a nice tribute.
Last edited by jorkel (2007-01-12 10:09:57)
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Well, you’re right that “install fear” still has a lingering wrongness (and therefore eggcornishness) about it that “bring down the curtain” doesn’t. So perhaps I should reserve the “Jorkel pair” pair terminology for the latter type of phrase.
No, it’ll probably never have any currency at all beyond the Eggcorn Forum. But every established online community needs a few secret handshakes.
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Closely related (the same malaprop if not the same eggcorn):
We at Sigma Pi believe in a pledgeship filled with teaching young men the same values that were installed
in our fraternity’s founders and in all of us.
The values that were installed in me by my family are reflected in CELTIC, or at least should be.
Unfortunately, her ladyship had also contrived to install in her younger son […] the firm belief that fate
had played him a cruel trick
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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