Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
“Do you think I should talk to Meryl first to make sure Sven does not get blind-sighted?”
From a well-known source of eggcorns at my office. The paradoxical nature of this term should be a clue that it might be wrong.“And the problem is we were blind-sighted on 9/11 by an evil we didn`t see coming…” http://joelrosenberg.blogspot.com/2006/ … at-my.html
I have a question; do those of you who used to support this government in your country feel embarrassed that you did… or not even that… just some sort of remorse that you were blind sighted by it… like regret?
http://forums.techguy.org/civilized-deb … ecard.html
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well, it’s not that paradoxical.
How “sighted” are you? Blind sighted—as in not at all.
I think it’s a perfectly reasonable imagery switch to make. “blind” has everything to do w/ sight. And who thinks of “side” as a verb?
In fact, if you just look at the words themselves, “blind” + “sided” doesn’t make much sense. To be blindsided, you are hit on your blind side—but “sided’ doesn’t necessarily take you there.
But to be surprised by something you can’t see because your sight of it was blinded, well, that makes perfect sense.
(also, an aside: most of us here are not that worried about how wrong, and therefore how stupid, the eggcorners are; we tend to marvel at their inventiveness and admire their imagery. We want to understand how, as reasonably intelligent people, they got to this particular usage, which they clearly consider to be right)
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I can see how someone who didn’t know the right verb could put the two related words together, but this seems more like laziness or ignorance than creative imagery, especially since blindsided means that your sight of something was blocked – not that you were blind.
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This one’s already in the forum:
Blindsighted by Kirsten Contribute! 2 2006-10-06 02:18:31 by Kirsten
Don’t Be Blindsighted! by carolw Contribute! 1 2006-09-15 07:00:50 by Tom Neely
three possible eggcorns by changeling Contribute! 0 2006-08-12 10:37:36 by changeling
Blindsighted for blindsided by brians Contribute! 0 2006-07-26 05:34:03 by brians
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well, we all just sort of skate right over laziness or ignorance; we tend to operate w/ the basic assumption that the people who use these terms are neither lazy or ignorant (that seems a rude assumption to make of someone who is earnestly trying to communicate, so we avoid it).
Instead we assume that there is a logical reason they think this is truly the right word, and try to figure out what it is.
Near-sighted, far-sighted—blind-sighted just isn’t that weird of a stretch. The words are related.
I will confess to a personal bias here AGAINST criticizing people who use eggcorns. I don’t like the snarky, holier-than-thou approach that I sometimes see people use when talking about others’ misuses of the language.
What I love about eggcorns, and this site, is that the general tone is quite friendly toward those who use the “wrong” term, and that we try to figure out why it might be the “right” term, atually.
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Curious eggcornologists will be interested to learn that ‘blindsight,’ whatever its status as an eggcorn, is also the standard name of a rare neurological phenomenon.
There’s a good short Wikipedia article about it, as well as an entire monograph by L. Weisskrantz.
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