Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
There is a new post on the main page that I think is almost definitely NOT a real eggcorn. I would have commented with the following if I could get the “comments” feature on the main page to work:
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This eggcorn seems almost too silly to be real. Combine that with the fact that the first suggestion on MS Word’s spell-checker for the typo “vew” is “view,” and I’m tempted to believe this is more error than eggcorn. (Note that the “f” and “v” keys on a QWERTY keyboard are right next to each other.)
I googled the terms “a view things” just to test this theory, and among the first ten hits were clear typos of “a few things.” Examples included: “A view things are impotent to know,” “had a view things that I wanted to say,” and “There are a view things that do not validate but maybe the final release will solve these problems.”
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I tend to agree. I was surprised to see it there. Question is though, if it’s not an eggcorn, what is it? A
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Dadge wrote:
Question is though, if it’s not an eggcorn, what is it?
A typo, I presume. Try typing the word “vew†into Microsoft Word and then spell-checking it. The first suggestion to come up is “view.†And given the fact that the “f†and “v†keys are right next to each other on most keyboards, it’s not surprising that “few†sometimes gets mis-typed “vew†and then auto-corrected to “view.â€
Last edited by tannerpittman (2007-05-02 14:33:32)
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Dadge wrote:
I tend to agree. I was surprised to see it there. Question is though, if it’s not an eggcorn, what is it? A
The Cupertino effect! It seems that a large number of EU documents contain the word ‘Cupertino’ where ‘cooperation’ is apparently intended. This is thought to result from a version of Microsoft Word spell check that did not include the word ‘cooperation’ (only the hyphenated ‘co-operation’) and would suggest ‘Cupertino’ (a city in California) as the “correct” word.
Thus, Benjamin Zimmer (apparently following unnamed EU translators) suggests “the Cupertino effect” for word errors introduced via automatic spell-checking.
See: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 02911.html
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002293.php
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Brilliant! The Cupertino effect – that’s exactly what it is. I’ll have to remember that.
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If it is an example of the Cupertino effect, then there’s an interesting irony here—it’s Ben Zimmer who entered “To name a view” as an eggcorn.
Personally, I’m sitting on the fence on this one, but Tannerpittman’s evidence is worrisome. By the way, the Database entry is here:
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I think there’s more going on here than just spell-checker corrections. Let’s start with a few examples where the substitution of “view” for “few” has no kernel of linguistic sense:
Google counts:
“A few good men” – 1,040,000
“A vew good men” – 2
“A view good men” – 4
.
“few and far between” – 1,370,000
“vew and far between” – 8
“view and far between” – 10
.
“had a few too many” – 91,600
“had a vew too many” – 1
“had a view too many” – 2
.
“a few things” – 9,550,000
“a vew things” – 166
“a view things” – 585
.
The last example is the most telling because it has a statistically significant number in each category. In an aggregate sense, we might assert that spell-checker corrections fall in the 20%- to -80% range. This seems reasonable: I would seriously doubt any report saying that over 90% of posters have their spell-checker engaged.
Now, lets look at the eggcorn under consideration:
Google counts:
“to name a few” – 6,450,000
“to name a vew” – 7
“to name a view” – 969
If presence/absence of spell-checker (alone) were responsible for the two latter categories, then this would suggest that over 99% of the posters had their spell-checker on. I don’t believe it. The conclusion I reach is this: a vast number of the “to name a view” entries were intentional.
Last edited by jorkel (2007-05-04 09:53:18)
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Joe—This is a really interesting and clever analysis, and I’m glad that someone is coming to the defense of “To name a view”; as I said yesterday, I feel I can make a case either way.
Your evidence raises even more questions for me. Why are there so many hits for “a view things”? Even given 10 mil hits for “a few things,” that one is out of proportion with its fellows.
And let me muddy the waters further. I thought, “Okay, let’s test this with a phrase in which the ‘view’ should have about the same meaning it has in ‘to name a view.’” So I googled “to cite a view.” That gets only 2 hits, while “to cite a few” gets 100k. I don’t know why this would be proportionally much less common than “to name a view,” since the meaning seems quite similar. The proportions here seem very roughly more like those for “a few things.”
The only conclusion I can draw is that spellcheckers and eggcorns aren’t the only issues here—there must be factors we haven’t accounted for. And I worry that Google statistics may be a problem in this case. If you look at unique hits rather than raw hits, “to name a view” gets 210 hits, while “a view things” gets 153.
So what are the proportions of these reshapings in relation to their original phrases if we take the unique hits into account? If “to name a few” got as many hits as “a few things,” then we might expect there to be about 310 hits for “to name a view.” So proportionally, in terms of unique hits, “to name a view” is about twice as common as “a view things.” What surprises me here is that “to name a view” is proportionally ONLY twice as popular as “a view things.” If the former is an eggcorn and the latter a mere spellchecker artifact, I’d expect the difference to be much, much bigger. This is all still a bit puzzling to me.
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After posting the last comment, I realized there was something dunderheaded about my math. I pointed to the need to use unique Google hits rather than raw hits for this one. But then to figure out the proportions, I used—guess what?—the raw hits for “to name a few” and “a few things.” A statistically unsound approach, but I’m too tired to bother fixing it.
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I think the best way to figure out what’s going on with “To Name a View” is to Google it and look at the nature of the various sightings. 969 sightings is a bit much to wade through, so I stopped after 18 pages (176 items on my tally).
I tried to capture the topics being discussed when the phrase “to name a view” popped up. Over 90% occurred in connection with items mentioned in a series (which allowed easy classification). Here are some broad categories I discovered:
35 – computer
27 – business
20 – entertainment venues
16 – travel/sightseeing
70 – miscellaneous
6 – proper usage in specialized contexts
There’s plenty here to discuss…
First, there’s the high-tech crowd (computer, business) who were the people most likely to have their spell-checker turned on. So, I attribute their mistakes strictly to spellchecker.
Second, there’s the entertainment venue people. Most(?) of these usages are probably intentional plays on the word “view” (in place of “few”). Also, this crowd is a little less likely to have their spellchecker engaged.
Third, there’s the travel and sightseeing people. Given the relatively high occurrence (16) for such a specialized group, I’m prone to classify most/all of these as intentional wordplay.
Fourth, there’s the miscellaneous category. These ran the gamut of items having no special connection to the word “view” ...philosophies, rental car choices, brand names, minerals, food entrees, policy choices, adhesive tags, radio stations, emotions, documents, and other random things. Hence, I attribute all these mistakes to spellchecker.
My conclusions are the following:
1. There’s a hefty proportion—70% to 90%—that I would attribute to spellchecker.
2. There’s a small proportion—around 15 %—that I would attribute to intentional wordplay.
3. There’s a small number—fewer than 15 of the 176 reviewed—that might be candidates as eggcorns.
As we all should know by now, the same phrase can be a typo, a pun, an eggcorn (or something else) depending on the context and the intention of the utterer. Basically, all I’m saying here is that the vast majority of sightings are related to spellchecker and punning, and there’s really a much smaller pool of candidates for eggcorn status.
But, I’m still reserving judgment on whether any of those few remaining sightings are eggcorns.
Last edited by jorkel (2007-05-05 10:16:44)
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Jorkel –
That’s about as clever an analysis as I think someone can make without drawing statistical charts of some kind. I’m inclined to agree with you.
The reason I had balked at it being an eggcorn in the first place is that it reminds me of the “deep in my hearth” thing that somebody was posting elsewhere in the forum. In both, the standard usage just makes a great deal more sense than the purported “eggcorn” usage (to me anyway). My understanding was that the whole panache of eggcorns is that they usually actually make sense on a level that the idiom doesn’t. (“butt naked,” to “buy one’s time,” “coming down the pipe,” etc.)
Anyway, I guess the question now is whether a usage merits a place in the database if,on the one hand, it’s just a few goofballs or non-native speakers (not to equate the two, mind you) who blurt it out occasionally as opposed to, on the other hand, the expression actually having some currency out there among the less-than-well-read.
Last edited by tannerpittman (2007-05-06 16:55:57)
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