Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I have heard and seen this several times, such as in this article:
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=829
The relevant sentence is a bit more than halfway down, and the sentence reads: “The moderate feminism, which is more dominant, has spawned all the psychological dribble about “Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus,” and all the rest.”
However, searching for other instances of this with google is hard, because context is so important, but “psychological dribble” gets 45 hits.
What I find particularly interesting about this eggcorn is that a visual/physical dimension is added to the statement through the substitution of “dribble” for “drivel” – I get a picture in my head of psychologists drooling.
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Hi, Lauralai—and a belated welcome to the forum to you. This is a really popular submission, one that probably should have been let into the Database long ago. In any case, it’s been suggested a number of times. On one occasion, Zinho went and did a useful roundup of forum posts on drivel>>dribble. You have to scroll down to the second comment on the thread here: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=644
I think there are also a couple of other earlier posts on this from the period before the forum was created.
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Thanks, Pat! I really hope this one makes it into the database (sometime this year… haha)! I guess I should have searched the forum for “dribble” before posting, but I searched the eggcorn database for “dribble” and didn’t find it listed, so I assumed it hadn’t been posted in the forum yet.
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No problem! We know our search buttons are cranky, so we point people in the right direction but we try not to give them a hard time. You probably went to the main page and used the top search button. That one is dedicated to entries in the Database, and it’s our crankiest searcher. Right below that is a button labeled “Google Search” which will search both the Database and the Forum. That’s usually the best bet, though sometimes it, too, won’t bring up every hit on the site. And then there are the search buttons at the top of every page. Those return information in a different format than the other two, and sometimes they return hits different from those obtained with the “Google Search” option on the main page.
Our search buttons are very mysterious. It adds to the weird charm of the site. Or something.
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Lauralai, I love your image of drooling psychologists.
I think the contempt that accompanies the word “drivel” makes that “blithering/blubbering idiot” image switch particularly appealing.
(speaking of which, there are Ghits for “blubbering idiot,” but in many cases, someone actually was crying, so it’s eggcornish, but not completely)
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