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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Hi –
Listening to an Irish radio show (“The Tubridy Show”) on 16th April 2008, I heard a guest use the phrase “The poor man was haunted down for the rest of his life”.
Seems to me to be a good eggcorn candidate – it conjures up the image of the man being pursued not just by any old hunter, but by scary ghosts. Eugh.
I can’t find any reference to this on the Eggcorn database, and a Google search turns up about 2,810 hits for “haunted down”, though not all of those are for the eggcorn. (eg, “is the Titanic haunted down there on the bottom of the sea?”)
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2033
regards
Ben
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Is there an audio archive or a recording of this radio program anywhere?
The reason I ask is that I suspect hunt/haunt might reflect a pronunciation difference. The speaker may pronounce hunt differently than you do—perhaps owing to different dialects. (Are you Irish, Ben? Was the speaker on the Irish radio program?)
Or perhaps more likely, the speaker could have made a speech error. Anticipating the vowel in down may have caused the individual to pronounce hunt in an unusual way.
That is not to say that this couldn’t be an eggcorn. The database is full of examples, such as stock>>stalk or jaw>>jar-dropping, which result from pronunciation differences.
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/category/e … ht-merger/
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Hi Nilep –
Yep, both I and the interviewee speak a similar dialect of Hiberno-English (“South County Dublin”, as it’s known locally ;-) ), so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a case of me mishearing the pronunciation, or the speaker making an error – though I understand what you mean by “anticipating the vowel in ‘down’”.
The show has a weekly podcast digest; http://www.rte.ie/radio1/podcast/podcast_tubridy.xml ...but it’s not obvious to me which of those contains the snippet, if any. I’ll see if I can dig it up for you.
Perhaps “haunted down” is just a plain old malapropism?
regards
Ben
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Ben wrote:
Yep, both I and the interviewee speak a similar dialect of Hiberno-English (“South County Dublin”, as it’s known locally ;-) ), so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a case of me mishearing the pronunciation, or the speaker making an error – though I understand what you mean by “anticipating the vowel in ‘down’”.
Yes, your shared dialect makes mis-hearing unlikely, but it doesn’t really affect the possibility that the speaker made a speech error.
This could be a speech error, including either a mispronunciation or a malapropism (among other possibilities). It could still be an eggcorn, though, if it’s users see (for example) humans being chased is an example of haunting more so than hunting.
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