Eggcorn Forum

Adrian, while I’ve always accepted that some formal qualification in language/linguistics is probably necessary for our gatekeepers, I’ve often had great difficulty in understanding some of the choices they’ve made and the grounds for their inclusion. In addition, none, with the exception of yourself, seem to be regular contributers, so I can only applaud your proposal and hope that it may yield something useful…

Peter

Here’s one I don’t understand. What is the supposed imagery?
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/420/jive/

When I saw that, and saw that comments were disabled, I was wondering why, and I wonder if maybe one thing that could be done is to keep comments active… let entries always be under discussion instead of carved in stone… because you can never tell what new information will come to light. Its possible that a non-eggcornish explanation for the usage will be made clear by some new discovery.

All right, I was wondering at what point I’d have a forum rebellion on my hands.

Adrian—it is probably good you’re bringing this out in the open. I also owe you an email, and both the issue you raised there (finally editing that impossible intro text) and here are touching on the same matter.

The reason for the slowness of new entries on the main database is very simple: Availability of myself, as an “enterer”, but also as the gardener who takes care of the back-end, responds to hosting and display emergencies etc., and of Arnold Zwicky and Ben Zimmer—both have busy professional and personal lives. None of us is getting anything but informal recognition out of this work, and there are situations in life when we have to cut down radically on what one can do: I’ve just been through about more than a year of that, and you will be able to imagine that in some situations the inability to update a hobby site, however beloved, pales behind other worries.

So my first thing is to say I’m sorry.

But as far as I am concerned, this is in fact getting better. Over the last month I’ve managed to back through the forums and pursued links to assess how bad the situation is—and started entering again, after a long hiatus.

All three, laxadaisical, curve/curb and maybe easedropping (I’m not feeling I have a good grasp on this one yet) are on my “to be done immediately ” list, simply because the forum entries receive a lost of search engine hits, which shows that people out there are interested in these. The number of 200 good eggcorns in the forums does not look far off the mark. If I sometimes enter other eggcorns, not suggested in the forums, first, this happens because they aren’t mentioned in the forums: at least yours are not going to get lost! They are searchable, findable, documented. And yes, many of them should be in the main ECDB, but consider: outside the forums, Arnold Zwicky has a backlog of hundreds, and mine is not much shorter.

One of the things I did a while ago was disabling the comments after spam/CPU complaints from my web hoster. There are other “features” of the site that are the way they are simply because they need fixing.

I have to run right now, but I will revisit this thread tonight to talk further what your wishes are about what to do first:

• a shortlist of high-priority eggcorns, elaborated here in the forums?
• getting the individual comment system back up?
• a series of articles on borderline cases, or how to spot a non-eggcorn? (I’ve been working on that.)

• What? And how?

  Chris

  P.S.: “jive” for “jibe” seems unproblematic to me. The dance?

I just sent an Email to Chris stating my top 50 preferences, so heads up Chris. (Just to give others an idea of evenhandedness: I originated 100-150 eggcorns in the Forum, but included only 11 of my own in the list I submitted). Others poster are welcome to submit their own preference list. The main criteria that I used were these: How credible is the eggcorn? and How widespread is the eggcorn?

Personally, I prefer the notion of gatekeepers (Chris, Adrian, others) reviewing the eggcorns before they enter the Database. That helps to maintain high-quality content and a more uniform format.

I agree with Jorkel about holding on to a small group of gatekeepers with linguistic training. I was a member of the Forum back when the Database was still set up as a Wiki. (A few longtime members still seem to be able to post Contributions to the Database itself, but the final contribute button seems to be disabled for most members.) I didn’t think the level of contributions was all that high—a lot of things got into the Database that shouldn’t have.

I suspect that I currently have clearance to enter things in the Database, but I’ve purposely avoided it because I really think Chris/Ben/Arnold should have some kind of input on all articles in order to maintain consistency.

After the wiki capacity was largely disabled, the contributions started reflecting (what I interpret to be) Chris’s vision a lot more closely, and they were just plain better in respecting the criteria of eggcornicity. I know a few of the regulars have raised questions about some of the recent entries made by Profs. Zimmer and Zwicky, but Ben and Arnold also have tons of excellent articles in the Database. So I think the more recent system is necessary to ensure quality and a consistency of vision. But, yes, quantity needs desperately to be worked on. I think we’ll be hearing more soon.

1. Ah, I hadn’t realised that most visitors don’t have the ability to add to the database. (I suddenly feel quite honoured that I’m able to.) So sztorno re some of my previous remarks. (Sztorno is a great Hungarian word that means “Back to square one” or “ignore” or etc. – I guess it must come from another language – is it Latin?)

2. “Cowtow” is definitely a bit iffy. I enjoyed finding a few “cow-towned”s though. A

what I wish is that the comments weren’t shut off on so my of the entries. (unless there’s some trick to posting comments?)

Every family has a few questions that aren’t supposed to be asked around the dinner table. “Who was it who lived in the attic when I was a kid?” “Why don’t you ever talk about your earlier marriages?” “What was grampa doing in the Ukraine in 1951?” “Is it true I have three siblings I’ve never met?” You just asked a bunch of ours.

Well, I’m kidding to a degree. It’s not so much that there are things we won’t talk about—rather, we’ve sort of decided that talking about them amongst ourselveselves doesn’t get us anywhere—there are too many eggcorns that need to be hunted down in the meantime.

There’s a very basic problem on this site. The three people who are supposed to be evaluating entries from the forum and entering them into the database simply haven’t done much of that in quite some time. Members of the forum have made a number of suggestions—both here, and in emails to Chris—about rectifying the situation. Nothing’s happened. My own emails have gone unanswered, as have those of others. I don’t know why, and I obviously don’t want to speculate. And as Ken Lakritz has noted, setting up the Database and Forum was so much work that one feels a bit ungrateful suggesting that Chris should do more work in addition. However, the idea of getting the gruntwork done by volunteers so that it could be evaluated/tweaked by Chris or others seems like a good one to me—it was among the things suggested last summer—and I really hope a way of managing it can be found.

Personally, I’d prefer not to see criteria imposed on posting to the forum. Yes, I wish a lot more things just got posted to the “Slips” page. But the forum really is our sandbox, and I think people should feel welcome to grab a shovel and start playing the second they stumble upon us. Some people are going to go away immediately when we tell them, “No, that’s not an eggcorn.” But Chris’s original idea was that the people who really cared would start to pick up the basics from others’ comments, and then apply them. That still seems like a good principle to me. And we have had newcomers argue vehemently that contributions that clearly didn’t seem like eggcorns to the vets really did fit whatever criteria the vets laid out. And those noobies have generally gone away. So a list of criteria really might just provide a different set of things to be unhappy about for some people.

Still, it’s a little weird that we haven’t yet formulated a short list of criteria that can be posted under Eggcornology somewhere. We’ve hashed out the basics many times. The original and the eggcorn should a) sound very similar, b) mean roughly the same thing in the same context, c) not be obviously related etymologically. And perhaps most importantly, the eggcorn should introduce a new set of imagery that seems to refer on some level to the meaning of the original word. But we disagree sharply on how to define all of those criteria. And I’m sure there are things I’m forgetting. Maybe hashing out such a list would be a good collective project for the summer. What’s a good number of criteria? I’ve got 4 above, but some of those might be deleted, added to, split, etc. I don’t think that more than, say, 10 would be helpful. But could all of us agree on a definitive wording? And would the Database gatekeepers concur with our conclusions? Anyone want to take a first shot at starting such a thread under Eggcornology—with the understanding, of course, that we’ll all fall upon the prototype like a bunch of piranhas?

The “eggcornista” label is automatic—when you’ve made 50 posts, it appears next to your name. It can be reset to reflect any number. 50 seemed like a good goalpost back when Ken, David Fishbait, Craig, Adrian and I seemed to be the only regulars and there were only a few posts a week. These days, some people attain 50 in a few weeks.

I’m not sure I’ve responded to everything, but I need to do some work I’m paid for sometime today. I’m sure others are responding even as I type, though.

Yes, that’s right, the intentionality thing has to be in there—gotta rule out puns, spontaneous production errors, etc.

DT, you and I have already gotten in trouble once today for hijacking a thread, so we should probably get around to moving this to Eggcornology under a title like “Draft Eggcorn Criteria” or some such thing. Formulating the criteria might not be so bad, but providing a list of model eggcorns might get really interesting.