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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I just encountered “none scientific” in the wild and a google search finds 1,010 hits for it, mostly relevant (the two words do not appear next to each other in that order with high frequency.) Given that in the vast majority of these instances it occurs as two separate words (rather than the hyphenated “none-scientific”) it doesn’t appear to be a typo, but I can’t decide if it’s a true eggcorn since “non-” and “none” are etymologically related. My second combination found similar numbers: “none judgmental” gets 1,030 – though “none judgemental” gets 2,370. Interesting that the non-standard spelling of the modified adjective gets a higher count by more than double. Other combinations found much higher numbers as you can see from the following list.
(“None standard” gets 40,100, but with a higher percentage of irrelevant hits due to the relatively frequent occurrence of “none” followed by an unrelated “standard” in spec sheets and technical literature).
Calls to mind that line from Spinal Tap – “How much more black can you get? The answer is ‘none’. None more black”.
Others:
none stop – 167,000 (though with high number of none relevant hits)
none member – 47,100 (ditto)
none smoker – 13,400
none fat – 12,100 (How much more fat do you want? None. None more fat.)
none professional 11,200
none believer – 5,820 (the title of a play!)
none violent – 3,270 (first hit actually the name of the page it calls up: “None Violent Direct Action forum”)
none alcoholic – 3,130
none profit – 2,380
none competitive – 1,200
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Welcome to the Eggcorn website, Joe_Boyd. I think you instincts are mostly correct on this find. Since the etymology of non- and none are very close, it does weaken any argument for an eggcorn.
However, a tidy explanation for all those (various) occurrences you mention seems difficult to identify. My spell-checker doesn’t attempt to replace “non” with “none” when only a hyphen is missing, but perhaps other spell-checkers respond differently. Also, I checked to see whether both varieties of spelling appear in the same document. E.g., I ran the following Google searches:
12,100 “none fat”
591 “none fat” nonfat
(The latter search locates documents where both spellings are found). For example…
Super Unintelligent People – Weight Lifters?glass of none fat soy milk, piece of fruit snack 8:00: bagel with a piece of non fat cheese before bed: protein shake I’m not a robot, I do eat junk food …
infamousxsup.proboards25.com/index.cgi?action=gotopost&board=g1&thread=1144808845&post=1145472751 – 38k – Cached – Similar pages
Food Articles: Health, Beauty, and FitnessWhen looking for soft cheese, look for nonfat or low-fat cottage cheese or ….. people that ate none fat dressing, absorbed almost zero of the nutrients, ...
www.improvingyourworld.com/health/cat_food.html – 127k – Cached – Similar pages
European Journal of Cancer : PKA-dependent growth stimulation of …Membranes were blocked with 5% non-fat dry milk, probed with rabbit polyclonal CREB and … Membranes were blocked in 10 ml of 5% none-fat dry milk (Kroger, ...
linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0959804905007537 – Similar pages
Just to check another one…
167,000 “none stop”
938 “none stop” nonstop
Although this explains less than 1% of the errors, it might provide some insight into situations where the misspelled word doesn’t appear more than once in the same document.
I sure wish I could say something more definitive.
Last edited by jorkel (2007-06-14 13:25:40)
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I’d categorise this as a common spelling error, rather than an eggcorn. Examples I often see are “none paying bidder” (ebay) and “non set”, which is what many pupils write in their homework diary.
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