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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Google counts on Jan 11, 2007
307,000 “old haunts”
1,250 “old taunts”—questionable eggcorn.
“Haunts” are places frequently visited. (I would’ve guessed that “visiting one’s old haunts” had reached idiom status, but I can’t seem to locate it as such). At any rate, the transformation of “old haunts” to “old taunts” seems linguistically plausible, and the status of the latter as an eggcorn would depend upon finding the corresponding usage. But after a little hunting around with Google, I can’t seem to find any solidly eggcornish usages. It appears that “old taunts” has its own distinct usage—even though the inclusion of “old” seems to hark back to “old haunts.”
Questionable examples…
Dissendium.com – Forums – The Dark Years! Chapt.34 Lord Voldemort …... that when he needs to get away from people he returns to his old taunts. ... We hope you will enjoy your visit here†the old wizard said as they left. ...
www.dissendium.com/forums.php?m=posts&q=24418&d=435 – 79k – Supplemental Result – Cached – Similar pages
Vital InformationTalking about all my old taunts from childhood. My mom actually worked at Rascal House for 25 years, retired this past April. Love them pickles! ...
vitalinformation.blogspot.com/2005/01/florida-i-spent-8-days-in-south.html – 34k – Supplemental Result – Cached – Similar pages
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Wow, this must have required a lot of patience—there are a lot of references to “old taunts” on the web.
From the excerpts you’ve quoted, the use of “old taunts” here sounds pretty similar to the standard phrase—what do you see as different?
I may have misunderstood your comment about “visiting one’s old haunts”; if so, forgive me telling you something you may already know. But if you want to find examples of “visiting my/her/his/our/etc old haunts” all together, a nice Google trick is to substitute an asterisk for the variable word. Googling “visiting * old haunts” gets over 700 hits.
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Thanks for the advice Pat. I wasn’t aware of the wildcard * for assisting Google searches. Is there a wildcard that can be used within words, e.g., “visit*” to get access to all tenses of the verb “visit”? (Perhaps you could give a tutorial on advanced Googling—or cite a helpful reference).
Searching through 1250 sighting of “old taunts” wasn’t so difficult since Google seems to truncate the list at a much lower number—perhaps somewhere after a dozen pages. I’m not sure if this is just another Google artifact that I’m not well-versed at resolving. Any advice on this one?
Googling either “visit * old taunts” or “visiting * old taunts”—with the quotation marks included—returned no hits for me. (When I drop the quotation marks, I get results that don’t preserve the word order). Another enigma, perhaps?
Getting back to the potential eggcorn, I can find virtually nothing where “old taunts” refers to a place. The usage of “old taunts” mainly refers to 1. verbal jabs or 2. menacing characters in (video) games. I think this eggcorn might be a bust.
Last edited by jorkel (2007-01-12 09:38:51)
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The wild card is good for phrases, but unfortunately Google doesn’t allow wild cards at the end of words or in the middle. Their “stemming” technology actually means that you often get derivatives of words whether you want them or not.
When Google cut off your results for “old taunts,” they were actually doing you a favor. The raw results include lots of duplicates which can swell the numbers dramatically. The truncated results you got indicate more or less the number of unique results; they’re therefore a far better indication of how widely a word is used than the raw results we usually cite. (In older posts on this site, you’ll occasionally see posters differentiating between “raw” and “unique” results.)
To find the number of unique results for a search, you can do one of two things. You can page ahead to the last page Google will show you, and then look at the number of hits indicated on that page. But that can be cumbersome if you get a lot of results, so you can also do a search, and then add “&start=950” (without the quotations, and without a space) to the resulting URL; hit “enter” again and that will take you to the last page of unique results, and that page will give you a count.
This is all a little abstract; just ask again if some of it isn’t clear. And I think that pretty much exhausts my little bag of Google tricks.
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