Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I’m going over drafts for my Introduction to Anthropology class right now. One of the topics for papers is on asexual and sexual reproduction and the advantages and disadvantages of both. Under the disadvantages of sexual reproduction a student wrote about how if the “insect taboos” are not properly followed, genetic variation in a species can decrease. I thought how great it was that he mistook insect for incest and about how appropriate it is. Humans as insects with their own little taboos. We do scurry about. The other meaning is a bit grosser, i.e. taboos against having sex with insects, which certainly would reduce our genetic variability.
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A related reshaping—originally found by Ken Lakritz—is in the Data here: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/634/insectuous/
I like “insect taboo” in its own right, however—wouldn’t want to go reducing genetic variability….
I don’t know whether these are eggcornish or—as the people responding to the Database entry maintain—typos.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-03-29 01:38:00)
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I did think about whether it was a typo, but he wrote it more than once in that little paragraph so I think he heard something that he thought was insect when we were discussing it in class. The sad thing is that it was also in our textbook, so if he was confused he could have looked it up. But maybe hearing it as insect and then reading it in the book, his mind switched the letters of the word to reflect what he thought it was? Who knows what goes on in the mind of college students but they do come up with some amusing phrases!
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youngturck wrote:
I did think about whether it was a typo, but he wrote it more than once in that little paragraph so I think he heard something that he thought was insect when we were discussing it in class. <snip>
‘Typo’ is such a catchall term.
Most clearly it is appropriate for fingerslips, it seems to me. But it would not be easy for your finger to slip on a qwerty keyboard and hit the ‘c’ key instead of the ’s’ key and vice versa. If it had been ‘incext’ or ‘indest’, that would be a more probable explanation.
Metatheses (ordering switches), especially when they are sequential on at least one typing hand, fit pretty well as typos, and this might be such a case. But the intervening letter ‘e’ is not on the opposite hand, which lessens the plausibility (I think. Haven’t done any serious investigation on this.)
If the person’s fingers actually typed the known word ‘insect’ when he was trying to arrive at ‘incest’, then what you have is a kind of malapropism, not really a typo. It is an erroneous retrieval of a similar signal (signifiant), rather than an inept striking of the keys.
A more thorough-going malapropism would be if the person really had come to think that ‘insect’ was the proper form for the meaning intended. The repetition of the error lends plausibility to this guess.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-06-14 18:01:15)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Youngturck wrote:
The sad thing is that it was also in our textbook
One time after an Econometrics exam, a fellow student mentioned that he didn’t understand the statistical principle behind a term we had to define: He had read it as “casual relationship”, but it was actually “causal relationship.” Perhaps something similar happened with “insect” and “incest.” We read what we think we see.
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