Eggcorn Forum

I can’t be sure that I see the same difference between the two citations as Spackle, but they do seem distinct to me, too. “A mere blip” usually means something small and insignificant. A “blimp” by contrast is huge and impressive. As a result, “a mere blimp” in the first quotation looks somewhat oxymoronic. I wonder whether it’s truly an eggcorn—it’s hard to believe that the writer has thought about what kind of sense “mere blimp” makes.

But I can see various arguments for salvaging the phrase’s eggcornicity. If you’re thinking of this idiom as coming out of military scenarios (as Booboo and I clearly do), then blimps are relatively less threatening “blips”—unlike bombers or submarines, they’re not a good weapons-delivery system. From that perspective, blimps may earn the “mere” modifier.

The writer of the second citation seems to have recognized (on some level) the disparity between “blip” and “blimp,” and has rationalized the reshaping to accommodate the imposing bulk of blimps. “A blimp on the radar” in the second quotation means what I’d expect: something large and worrisome. But that may also disqualify it as an eggcorn—an eggcorn should mean more or less the same thing as the original phrase. We’ve run into this type of thing before: an eggcornish reshaping that turns out to have a different significance from the original. I don’t think Arnold Zwicky or anyone else has yet tried to name this phenomenon.

Does the person imagining a blimp on the radar have to be making any real sense when they imagine it for it to be an eggcorn, as long as they ARE imagining a blimp on the radar?

Not all expressions seem to make sense the way people use them these days… wouldn’t it be enough that the person is thinking of the strange, old blimp from the movies imagery, showing up on the strange old radar from the movies imagery, without having thought through whether a blimp could be “mere” or not?

I’m thinking of it like this… a person calling an acorn an eggcorn simply heard it incorrectly, and assumes the name came from the roughly egg-shaped appearance of an acorn. They aren’t really thinking it through beyond “oh, people must call these eggcorns because they look like an egg.”

So a person using the eggcorn “blimp on the radar” doesn’t really (in my opinion) have to have thought through the expression any more than having a picture in their head from old movies of blimps and radar. Thinking sort of reflexively “oh they must say it that way because they used to detect blimps on radar back in the war or something.” There’s the alternate imagery, and it makes enough sense from their perspective. I think whether or not that alternate sense is entirely appropriate for the given use when you get into dissecting it is kind of secondary to whether or not its an eggcorn.

After all, much of our day-to-day language wouldn’t stand up to that kind of scrutiny.

I guess what I’m saying is that I think it does pass the test, in that a blimp is something a person would reasonably expect to show up on a radar, etc. I don’t think the size of a blimp matters, or whether in the context of things that appear on a radar a blimp is a particularly noticeable one or not.
It just seems to me that a blimp being something that would show up on a radar, or might be expected to be sought out by radar is enough.

The “mere” aspect of it, the idea that there’s some kind of insignificance to it I don’t think has to be contained in the relationship between the replaced word and the rest of the phrase… it can just be there in how its used. Something that shows up on radar could be seen as still far away, out of sight and thus though it is acknowledged, recognized, it’s not of immediate concern. I think that is conveyed equally whether you say “blip on the radar” or “blimp on the radar.”
I think that was actually the original intent of the expression, since al you get on radars are blips – blip wasn’t meant to mean diminutive, but rather simply detected – but still far away.

Forgive me if I’m not making any sense though… I’m fighting a lack of sleep and stomach illness.

Wait—there are two very different meanings of “blip,” and “blimp” is a better substitute for one than it is for the other. Jorkel’s right, of course, in saying that for someone watching a radar screen, any object that causes a blip is a “blip.” And the OED agrees in their first definition of “blip”:

2. A small elongated mark projected on a radar screen.

There’s no hint of insignificance here—you’d want to take any such blip seriously until you knew what it represented. And that fits in well with the argument Craig and Jorkel are making. In that use, I guess I could see “blimps” standing in for anything detected on a screen (though even there I’m concerned “blimp” could just be a malaprop).

But that’s not the way the word is being used in the phrase “blip on the radar,” where “blip” means something insignificant. And again the OED agrees that this use of blip is very different:

b. Chiefly in a blip on the radar (screen) and variants: something which is insignificant or attracts little attention.
[Note for anyone playing along at home: this definition was added to the online edition in 2006—so it won’t have shown up in a print edition yet.]

Blimps certainly attract a lot of attention. In the “blimp on the radar screen” phrase, the substitution of “blimp” for “blip” seems a bit startling to me because it seems to imply virtually the opposite of what the phrase means. To be an eggcorn, a reshaping has to have pretty much the same meaning as it did in the original. This one doesn’t, so I’m unpersuaded by the latest argument mounted in defense of “mere blimp.” But as I said before, there may be other arguments out there that would work better to salvage this.