Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
‘Ripeness’ and ‘rifeness’ are not dissimilar – ripeness is rife at harvest time and the sense of burgeoning abundance is clear. Despite this, ‘crime is ripe’ and ‘the time is rife’ sit uneasily in my ear; though not an eggcorn, (if not mere typo’s) there is certainly something flounderish afoot, or afin…
and that the view of western governments towards their citizens seems to echo his sentiments, should we not consider that the time is rife for revolution or …
www.allempires.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=20899 – 50k – Cached
The time is rife for formation of a coalition of forces known as the Food Police. These days everyone is watching… Animalconcerns …
groups.yahoo.com/group/ivu-veg-news/messages/5844 – 49k – Cached
[ image: Crime is ripe in Jamaica’s capital Kingston]. Crime is ripe in Jamaica’s capital Kingston. The riots now tearing through Jamaica’s capital Kingston …
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/the_economy/326165.stm – 26k – Cached
As Cloward (1979) has pointed out, people from social environments where crime is ripe and is therefore. easily “learned†are more likely to respond with …
www.sozialwiss.uni-hamburg.de/publish/I … 2006-1.pdf
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For me, you’re entirely on the right track here. “ripe/rife” is in the DB—as rife with>ripe with . However, I think it is rather a very common flounder, in Arnold Zwicky’s terminology. This is how he puts it in the Pails and Flounders article:
Flounders are the counterpart of ordinary classical malapropisms (“ordinary” here means: not of the eggcorn subtype). In both flounders and—let me continue this frenzy of naming with yet another term—PINEAPPLES (“He is the very pineapple [pinnacle] of politeness”, from Mrs. Malaprop herself), an incorrect word E is substituted for a phonologically similar word T, but in flounders, the error word E and the target word T also overlap semantically, while in most pineapples E and T are semantically distant (if E is an existing word at all). Obviously, there’s some room here for borderline cases.
Now these “borderline cases” may also be that a substitution can belong to several categories, depending on each individual user. (Quite obviously, most eggcorns can also be common typos—the kind where the writer would just look and correct a slip without any deeper hesitation about what should have been the “right” form.)
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Here’s an example I stumbled upon the other day, which motivated me to look up this old thread:
I’m in Austin, TX and praise the Lord I’m not exposed to much of this, but you are right it is ripe in most of the out lying areas.
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Also:
Chris Waigl wrote (quoting Arnold Zwicky):
...In both flounders and—let me continue this frenzy of naming with yet another term—PINEAPPLES (“He is the very pineapple [pinnacle] of politeness”, from Mrs. Malaprop herself), an incorrect word E is substituted for a phonologically similar word T, but in flounders, the error word E and the target word T also overlap semantically…
From this definition of flounders, I see no way to distinguish them from eggcorns. The phonological similarity and the semantic overlap are both there. Can someone make it clear to me how a flounder differs from an eggcorn—if indeed it does?
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I think it is the floundering back and forth between them (until one or both founder) that is criterial. Or something like that. Not all eggcorns do that. But I agree that many things people call flounders are highly eggcornish.
(I just ran across the following, quoted from Nature :)
Science is ripe with problems: irreproducible results, manipulation of statistics, widespread sexual harassment and gender discrimination, and conflicts — or at least what seem to be conflicts — of financial interest, to name but a few.
In my family a well-attested meaning of “ripe†was “rotten to the point of bursting†which fits a number of contexts for rife very well.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2017-05-11 21:17:44)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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