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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Just read this sentence in the NYTimes:
“Tales of passengers being stranded on tarmacs for hours have become legion.”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/business/28delay.html)
I always thought it was “tales…become legend.”
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though “legion” means “many,” so if you have a lot of tales…..
(my name is legion)
“tales have become legend” got me only 5 Google hits. but then, “tales have become legion” got zero. (It may be that I have no idea how to properly phrase the search)
Wait, “tails ARE legion” got 485 hits; “tales are legend” got 47
“are legion” seems logically right—are many. but “tales ARE legend” makes no sense.
Tales BECOMING legend makes sense; they start as mere stories, then become the oft-repeated, iconin thing that a legend is.
Tales becoming LEGION is as sensible as them BEING legion—they gotta grow from nothing before they can become many.
Is “legend” the eggcorn?
Or is it just very similar-sounding terms that mean different things?
Last edited by TootsNYC (2007-09-28 08:34:55)
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Interesting problem. I think they’re both standard phrases and independent of each other, but it’s true that they start seeming odd grammatically once you think about them.
”(Person/thing X) has become legend” is a formula that’s found in both academic writing and journalese, and it gets a very respectable 442 hits on books.google.com—including hits in books from prestigious presses like Oxford, etc. But that omission of the indefinite article “a” (“has become a legend”) seems odd in a way I’ve never thought about before. Maybe there’s a perceived parallel with constructions like “That battle has become history.” I think most native speakers would say that “a history” would be wrong there; maybe the same impulse that allows “history” to stand there naked also licenses an unarticled “legend.”
So then what’s up with “legion” in sentences like the ones Blandford cited? I’ve always thought that people were treating “legion” like an adjective in such sentences—basically synonymous with “many, numerous.” But neither the OED nor MW will go for that—the dictionaries list such that usage under the noun heading. Again, if it’s a noun, you might expect it to be “a legion,” but people just don’t say that. Perhaps the grammatical structure of the biblical original was influential enough to stand its ground even as the use of the phrase changed. But I’m a little more persuaded by my explanation for “legend” than I am for my “legion” guess.
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