Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
One can make a fairly neat argument for the eggcornicity of this one: a spacious argument is one containing logical holes so large you can drive a truck through them. But I’m actually not sure this isn’t merely malapropic. My “truck” argument doesn’t account for the “fallacious” or “dishonest” element in the original’s meaning, and a lot of the people who use this variant are certainly accusing others of some kind of dishonesty.
It’s rare – 82 unique Google hits – but it keeps some fancy company: one citation below is from PBS and another’s from the website of the Irish Dail. (Transcribing speech has got to be one of the world’s most thankless tasks.) Examples:
In fact, one lawyer from the Pentagon made the argument that that would be contrary to the U.S. constitutional protection of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, which of course was a completely spacious argument because the U.S. constitution doesn’t apply to Rwanda.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline … arley.html
I hold that comment in contempt; it is a spurious and spacious argument.
http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie … 20073.html
But what was the decision of the courts: It allowed all the perpetrators of the massacre to go scot free under a spacious argument that ’since all the accused belonged to upper castes, it is impossible that they would have gone walking to the hamlett.’
http://www.kafila.org/2007/01/16/toucha … evanamani/
It seems a spacious argument to me and should not even compared or brought up in a discussion about radical Islam as it is often used just to deflect the real serious issue.
http://www.highdefforum.com/showthread. … 51&page=20
Chrissy’s spacious argument only proves that it is he who’s the fool.
http://delawareliberal.wordpress.com/20 … 1th-magic/
I’ve always wondered where “specious” came from, so I finally looked it up. It’s from the Latin word speciosus, meaning “beautiful,” and that was the original definition of “specious” when it entered English around the beginning of the 15th century. But by the middle of the 17th century, people were using it to refer to “beautiful” words that cloaked someone’s true intent.
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I wonder if there’s any influence of other idioms containing “space.” For instance, a person who isn’t thinking right may be “spacy,” so his logic might be described as “spacious.” Or, a person may be said to have his head “way out in space”—leading to the same construction.
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if it comes from transcribing speech, it could also be a mishearing.
(I once wrote “affected” when someone said “effected”—I knew the difference in meaning of both words, but her accent made me think she MEANT “affected,” and i couldn’t figure out what she meant, but oh well, that’s what she said, I wrote it down. Her pronunciation was so firm, I never thought to rethink what she’s said.)
But I see an eggcorn possibility for it as well.
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