Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The nettime mailing list recently posted an item about changes to the list hosting and administration. This line caught my eye:
“There is a minor hick-up. Mailman requires a password for you to change your subscription setttings….”
I’ve never seen this substitution before, but it makes such perfect sense I’m almost wondering whether I’ve been wrong all along about “hiccup”. Either way, it strikes me as a beautiful eggcorn.
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“Hick-up” certainly makes sense in this context, phonetically and semantically resembling “f*ck-up”...
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“Hick-up” might be eye dialect rather than an eggcorn. That is, people may spell words the way they hear them without attributing any new imagery to them.
I believe the “hic” in “hiccup” (“hiccough”) is an incidence of onomatopoeia as is the “hick” in “hick-up.” Now, does the “up” portion of “Hick-up” qualify as an eggcornish departure of “cough” in “hiccough”? Maybe so, but that might already be the case with “hiccup.”
Although I haven’t answered definitively here, perhaps I’ve framed the question more explicitly.
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It strikes me as something more than simple ear-spelling, mainly because “hick-up” fits so nicely into the family of similar expressions—not just “f*ck-up” mentioned above but also “stuff-up”, “cock-up”, “balls-up, “mess-up” and I’m sure there are more. I’m not sure to what extent these are familiar in American English, but they’re common slang in the British and South African versions. If a “hick” is an unsophisticated person then a “hick-up” is just what you’d expect when you unleash that person on anything technical.
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You beat me to it! I just got “hick up” in an email and wondered if it counts as an eggcorn. Complete sentence from email:
“Please comment with any new bugs you discover, we hope to solve
them over the next few days. Hick-ups are likely, so please bear with us.”
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