Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
About 600 ghits. Examples:
Make loans and credit cards a lost resort.
home.universalclass.com/i/crn/11267.htm
Nobody wants to “get screwed” ;) And as a lost resort, some threaten legal
action (sometimes with no legal ground to stand on).
www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/thread/144307-1.html
Government will first negotiate with tribes, who are giving sanctuary to the foreign elements. Force would be used as a lost resort, he said.
www.paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=59955
They actually should keep some data and only use IMAP search as a lost resort,
because this hits performance when scaling up.
www.kolab.org/pipermail/kolab-format/20 … 00516.html
My doctor said to take medication as a lost resort during the first trimester, but one Tylenol or half a tylenol here and there if I’m desperate should be OK.
www.fertilitext.org/ubb/Forum10/HTML/000722.html
As a lost resort and having searched the web we decided to try bee pollen – we had never used it before but the amount of information was encouraging.
www.my-beepollen.com/testimonials.html
I think if you are going to practice a line then bolts should absolutely be a
lost resort.
www.rockclimbing.com/topic/8763
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Glad you have found your way here, Ken. Nice find. I’ve earmarked it for posting.
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After thinking about it for a bit: Substitutions of lost for last and vice versa are to be expected, since both are pronounced [lɑ:st] by many AmE speakers. Can we find more examples, for a future lost«»last entry?
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[Note, CW: I’m posting this on behalf of Pat Schwieterman, who clicked on “report”. The reason was that, as I learnt only today, users couldn’t post replys to posts. I apologise most humbly—this is not how it was supposed to work. I’ve corrected the configuration. Please reply away.]
Is it really common for speakers of American English to use a nearly identical pronunciation for “last” and “lost”? As a native speaker, I’m a bit surprised, though I’m also rather hesitant to question Chris on anything having to do with English.
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Pat, you’re giving me too much credit—I’m quite at sea when it comes to American dialects.
Questions to ask: Do you pronounce “god” with the vowel of “father” ([É‘:])? What about “cot” and “hot”? Then, is it the same for “boss”?
Or does any of those resemble the one you use for “caught” or “all” ([É”:]).
My main point was simply that BrE speakers would be very unlikely to merge “last” and “lost”, as the second vowel is unrounded, short and back ([É’]). Some have claimed that this vowel doesn’t exist at all in AmE.
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Chris—my own speech (Western US) might reduce all the a’s and o’s you mention to one sound—I really can’t tell. But for me the “a” of “last/has/flat” etc. stands distinctly apart from all those. Phonology scares me, but I think it’s front and near-open (“a-e ligature” as Anglo-Saxonists say). If I wrote “lost resort,” it would definitely be eggcornish.
Then again, I wouldn’t have predicted that Ken would find 160 hits for “pasterior.” And that probably can’t be explained by a schwa. Maybe I’m less representative in the sound of “last” than I’d’ve thought.
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