Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
“No one relished the reading of the verdict. One of the jurors asked if I would swap seats with her, as her usual position, so close to the public gallery and families, was more than she could bare.”—First-person story on jury service, Sunday Star-Times, New Zealand, April 13, 2008.
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There are several instances of bear for bare in the Forum, mostly in the noun sense of the large mammal, rather than the verb sense of carrying.
bear for bare
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1182
I hate to be the bear of bad news
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1712
bare hands vs. bear hands
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2090
One thread also discusses barer of bad news, which is pretty close to “more than she could bare.”
bare/barer for bear/bearer
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1721
The usage “more than she could bare” seems more like a demi-eggcorn, the substitution of a known word for an unknown one in an idiom or phrase, than a ‘true’ eggcorn. For me, an eggcorn must include new semantic imagery, so that the new, non-standard version makes as much sense (and presumably more sense, at least to the utterer) as the original.
In “barer of bad news,” there is the image of uncovering bad news, laying it bare. I can’t see any new semantic imagery in “more than she can bare,” though.
Of course, calling this a demi-eggcorn would necessarily assume that the verb sense of bear is unknown to the utterer, while the verb bare is familiar.
Obligatory Google statistics:
“More than I could bare” yields 7,460 raw (estimated) hits, but five of the first 10 appear to be making a pun. “More than she could bare” yields an additional 1,200, and “more than he could bare” another 2,810, most of which appear to be sincere.
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“Stripping in the Arctic,” she said, blushing, “was more than I could bare!”
She then took her sandwich to the bedroom and resumed masticating.
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