Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I noticed a prominent local community organisation’s website proclaimed the organisation as “non-secretarian”. I pointed this out to them and they changed it. I decided to google “non-secretarian” and came up with 500+ hits. All that I looked at, up to about the first 50 or so, meant “non-sectarian”. Is this a new eggcorn?
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Welcome to the forum, GeorgeT! I like “non-secretarian” a lot as an entertaining reshaping.
The touchstone for eggcornicity is whether the new form still makes a certain kind of sense in the same context. I think you have to be pretty clever—probably too clever—to make “non-secretarian” work in that regard. Maybe some users are associating “secretaries” with the structure that gives organized political or religious groups their cohesiveness. But that seems like a stretch; I suspect this one’s a malaprop. Perhaps other members of the forum will weigh in with other ideas.
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Patschwieterman describes the situation pretty well. “non-secretarian” is probably a malapropism because there is no literal meaning of “secretary” that makes sense in context. One could attempt to splice “non-secretarian” differently and pull out the word “secret,” but that only leads to other clever/ludicrous plays on meaning: I don’t think the congregation leaders intended “non-secret-arian” to mean “we don’t keep secrets from our flock.”
The key point is this: as long as the meaning of the word was always intended to be “not confined to a single sect” it cannot be an eggcorn. (This would just be a case of accidentally inserting an extra syllable where none was needed). But, if the ones who erected the sign had a mistaken understanding of the meaning, then we need to find out what that was to understand some mistaken imagery.
Last edited by jorkel (2007-06-10 07:03:20)
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