Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Just spotted “I have been lapse” for “I have been lax”, and Google reports the usage is rare but not unique. There are at this moment 166 hits for the first phrase, three apiece for “you have been lapse” and “we have been lapse” and one for “they have been lapse”. There are various technical terms such as lapse rate and lapse function which form normal phrases with the verb to be (“There were lapse rate disparities between the two experiments”) that make simpler searches harder to analyse, but there are plenty of examples of the pure eggcorn candidate.
Interestingly “a bit lapse” gets nearly 900 hits, the most common variant I can find.
“However, we accept that we have been slightly lapse in our journalistic procedures.” – http://brainsnap.com/politics/rumsfeld_resigns
“In recent times he has certainly become a bit lapse in his beliefs and is drinking, whereas he was once a teetotaller, and bedding every famous babe around.” – http://www.barcelonareview.com/rev/23.htm
“I know, I know. I have been lapse in updating my blog.” – http://adventuresofmm.blogspot.com/2007 … chive.html [note that variants of this particular apology may form the majority of finds. O tempora, O mores]
And so forth. There are clear semantic links between lax and lapse – if you’re lax, you let things lapse – although it’s of course possible to deliberately allow lapses, and such decisions may be the very opposite of lax. “After much deliberation, I let my subscription to the New York Review of Books lapse and spent the money on crack cocaine and hookers instead. My life has been far happier since.”
Nonetheless, as there are such strong connections between lax and lapse, the words do sound so similar and the sense of the eggcornic phrase is in no way diminished from the unmodified version, I think this is a good candidate.
Rupert
(I’m not the first person to note this here, I discover. Uniposter mrboatmeasure mentioned it in October 2006, with no response, in http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … 2170#p2170
“On a recent training course I heard several people talk about someone having a “lapse attitudeâ€, or suggesting that someone may have “been a bit lapse†in their approach to conducting a task.
If someone is “a bit lapse†in their approach, they may well have lapsed from the expected or previously attained standard, making this form quite apt.”)
Last edited by rupertg (2008-05-18 06:25:46)
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