Eggcorn Forum

This one has some potential. I like that it derives from the idiomatic “rue the day.” It also helps that “rule” is a more familiar word than “rue.” Both these factors favor an eggcorn. But… I can’t seem to extract the imagery required to make sense of “rule” (as esquire suggests). I’m wondering if this was a typo.

Excellent comments. I searched for previous notations to “rule the day” but hadn’t found them. I don’t think this is a typo, but I do agree that “rule” may have been used intentionally simply because it is more familiar than rue. I’ve been running it through my head, and can’t really make the leap to “rule.” I do love the humor though, of having this demi-eggcorn present in such strong speech. I can only imagine the clenched fist raised, eyes widened and then those words: “You will rule the day you crossed me!”

TootsNYC wrote:

when written by a dolt ¶ I hate to think of people who use eggcorns as dolts. ¶ I really, really don’t like to see insults or pejoratives directed at the people who create or use eggcorns. ¶ People who use these idioms wrong, or come up w/ substitutes, aren’t stupid. They just don’t happen to actually have learned the cliché, and are attempting to use the language and imagery they do know to understand it. ¶ Sometimes it’s fueled by their not reading a lot, or their having a limited selection of what they read. But sometimes it’s not even that; they don’t make a connection between what they’ve heard and the alternate version they read later.

I agree very much here. In many ways, the creation of an eggcorn is a sign of intelligence rather than the lack of it.

In her wonderful book Pullet Surprises (of which I own a copy—eat your hearts out!) Amsel Greene writes:

Experience convinces me that in general the Pullet Surprises of high school students spring from one or the other of two characteristic traits of youth: untroubled confidence in what they think they know, or the courage to face and conquer what they realize they do not know.

Her category of the “uneasily aware” includes many cases where you just have to admire the fecundity and inventiveness of those who come up with the errors.

C. S. Lewis in his Studies in Words says

[to avoid errors] knowledge is necessary. Intelligence and sensibility by themselves are not enough. This is well illustrated by an example within my own experience. In the days of the old School Certificate we once set as a gobbet from Julius Caesar
bq. Is Brutus sick and is it physical
bq. To walk unbraced and suck up the humours
bq. Of the dank morning
bq. and one boy explained physical as ‘sensible, sane; the opposite of “mental” or mad’. It would be crass to laugh at that boy’s ignorance without also admiring his extreme cleverness. The ignorance is laughable because it could have been avoided. But if that ignorance had been inevitable—as similar ignorances often are when we are dealing with an ancient book—if so much linguistic history were lost that we did not and could not know the sense ‘mad’ for mental and the antithesis of mental-physical to be far later than Shakespeare’s time, then his suggestion would deserve to be hailed as highly intelligent. We should indeed probably accept it, at least provisionally, as correct.¶ … So far from being secured against such errors, the highly intelligent and sensitive reader will, without knowledge, be most in danger of them. His mind bubbles over with possible meanings. … Hence the difficulty of ‘making sense’ out of a strange phrase will seldom be for him insuperable. Where the duller reader simply does not understand, he misunderstands—triumphantly, brilliantly.

(btw, can someone help me with getting newlines and paragraphs within a blockquote paragraph?)

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-06-16 23:07:37)

Good tip: I didn’t know this was Textile (and had never heard of Textile, that I remember).

Anyhow: going to try a couple of things:

This would be the first line

||
There should have been a blank line before and after this (empty tables)

||
no This should not have been passed through Textile<br /> I put an xhtml linebreak in it.
This text did go through Textile, but <br /> I have put an xhtml linebreak in it anyway.<br>
This should come after a more normal html linebreak.

This should presumably be outside the bq.

pre. This is supposed to be preformatted,
and could probably be
embedded in a bq. if you wanted to.

OK, looks like basically none of this worked, except the pre., but that shows up overtly, which is ugly. Must be the site is using an older version of Textile or something. I guess I’ll keep muddling on.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-06-17 08:41:34)