Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I know this one is already in the Eggcorn Database, but I just have to add this comment (and didn’t see a way to do this except via the forum):
A man my sister worked with said something was “a mute point.â€
She said, “You mean ‘a moot point.’â€
He responded, “No, a mute point: it goes without saying.†(This was delivered with a sort of “case closed†attitude.)
I think this is the neatest explanation—it’s simple, it makes sense, and it explains his version of the phrase in terms of another simple, catchy phrase.
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Another comment on (a possible extension of) the moot point > mute point eggcorn: something I hadn’t noticed before was its appearance not merely in print but actually in the speech of someone whose
accent makes a difference between moot and mute.
Accents with glide-deletion might pronounce both words /mu:t/ (though
deletion is much less common after labials than after, say, dorsals). In
Standard Southern British English, though, there’s no glide-deletion of /j/
between any consonant and /u/ (so impute > /impju:t/, tube > /tju:b/,
cube > /kju:b/, etc). But I’ve just heard a barrister, a speaker of this
dialect, on the TV referring to ‘a /mju:t/ point’. He meant what the
standard idiom refers to as a moot point, but clearly used a glide. Being
a lawyer, too, he would have been familiar with the word ‘moot’, which has
various legally-connected uses (some obsolete, but at least one current, in
the meaning ‘mock trial’).
So, was the speaker merely getting carried away with his rhetoric and thus
using the wrong word as a one-off, or does this genuinely mark a
progression of the eggcorn into a more standard register – a stage in
language change? The speaker was Hugo Charlton, a highly-placed criminal
lawyer in London, and the Law Officer and Chairman of the Policy Committee
of the (UK) Green Party. He was speaking in a televised debate under the
title ‘Should we break the law to save the planet?’ on the BBC debate
programme The Big Questions:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mfkvb
(As of right now, the evening of Sunday 30 August 2009, today’s programme
isn’t yet available online, but apparently it ‘soon’ will be. When
programmes get on the website, they’re usually available until the next one
is broadcast, which will be next Sunday morning.)
Again, someone who makes a large part of his living by making speeches in the courtroom ought not to have his speech affected by an emotional atmosphere. It looks to me, then, as if moot is
actually gradually being replaced by mute – since it’s probably true that
moot is not in many people’s active vocabularies (except in this set
phrase), but someone who would be much more likely to have moot in his
active vocabulary, a lawyer, still used mute in its place.
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