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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I was surprised to not find this eggcorn here.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7424281.stm
by a professor no less
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Welcome, Neblet:
Hmm. Seems to me you are implying that “draw dropped” is the original saying. Right? Or am I misinterpreting?
Here is the pull quote from Web site by the professor:
When I looked at it, my jaw dropped. I said we are onto something big here – Prof John Lane, Museum Victoria
But I’ve never heard “draw dropped.” (And this brings to mind the draw vs. drawer discussion a couple of weeks back.) When a person is amazed by something, a natural reaction is to open his/her mouth wide, hence their jaw drops. What would “draw dropped” mean?
Feeling quite combobulated.
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Jon—I looked at the BBC article yesterday when neblet first posted this, and it really did say “draw dropped” in both the pull-quote and the body of the article at that time. They’ve obviously spotted the non-standard usage since and have gone back and corrected it. And in fact you can still retrieve the “draw dropped” version from the Google cache. Just google “my draw dropped.” The BBC article is the first hit, and then hit the “Cached” button next to the URL.
“My draw dropped” in quotes gets 976 raw hits right now. That surprises me—I’ve never seen or heard this before. I wonder whether this is one of those “WTF typos” in which people’s fingers are just anticipating the dr- of “dropped.” Has anyone actually heard this in speech?
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Ah! I completely misunderstood neblet’s posting then. (Sorry.) The whole “draw” dropped construction still reminds me of “draw” vs. “drawer,” however, and I wonder if it is somehow derived from “dropping one’s drawers [draws?]” in amazement, shock, etc. The other possibility might be a transcription error based on British pronunciation (I remember a discussion here about the fact that duty in some dialects is indistinguishable from judy) and somehow draw was confused for jaw and taken down that way by the reporter.
These are the only somewhat logical explanations I can come up with.
Last edited by JonW719 (2008-05-29 17:20:30)
Feeling quite combobulated.
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JonW719 wrote:
The other possibility might be a transcription error based on British pronunciation (I remember a discussion here about the fact that duty in some dialects is indistinguishable from judy) and somehow draw was confused for jaw and taken down that way by the reporter.
I believe that the duty/judy dialects pronounce the vowel with a glide onset – that is, the pronunciation that most English speakers use for cue, some use for coupon, and fewer still use for Tuesday. Thus the stop+glide of duty /djuti/ sounds a lot like the affricate of judy /d3udi/, even more so in rapid speech. All of which is to say, I don’t think you’d get the same phenomenon with the vowel of jaw/draw.
The fact that the BBC editors changed the word in question suggests to me that is was a misspelling. I can’t say whether it was based on a transcription error/mishearing, or a “WTF typo”, or something else.
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My draw dropped?
Just when you conclude the world is one hundred percent weird, it gets one percent weirder. I can’t think of any semantic rationale for this substitution.
There is possible verbal source for the switch. Trying saying the word “jaw” and dropping your jaw. The /dz/ sound of the j, a voiced alveolar, turns into a plosive alveolar similar to /d/, and the sinking frenum pulls the tongue tip down, hinting at the approximant sound of the English /r/. Could “draw dropped” have started out as a pun and later morphed into a semantically vacuous idiom?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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