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#1 2006-09-20 14:48:07

Peter Forster
Eggcornista
From: UK
Registered: 2006-09-06
Posts: 1222

hindsight vs highinsight

Heard today in the wild – ”..the benefit of highinsight…” 147 googlehits:

So if you know all about this problem ( obviously not just highinsight ) , why doesn ’ t everyone use plastic scrapers in light of the potentially fateful …
www.airliners.net/discussions/general_a … n/1604230/ – 117k –
In highinsight, I would opt for blissfull ignorance. (286 words). »00:46 »1 Comments (2 ) »3 TrackBack(s) »Send Entry Posted by: SamRogg …
www.20six.co.uk/weblogCategory/zlgq6yuv8a67?c=6.2006 – 67k – Supplemental
... that he was not great in the part, and overcame his miscast and in highinsight I suppose he was but he was do damn good I don’t think of it that way. ...
superherohype.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-121187.html – 32k -

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#2 2008-06-21 01:13:09

Peter Forster
Eggcornista
From: UK
Registered: 2006-09-06
Posts: 1222

Re: hindsight vs highinsight

I heard this again last night in a telephone conversation and in light of JonW’s recent “42 pages of unanswered posts” thought it worth a revisit. “High insight” does have an independent though fairly limited existence and I suspect that if I were after such a term I’d opt for “deep insight”, which ought to mean something quite different but, like slow up/slow down, doesn’t.
Anyway, in all the dialects I hear on a regular basis “high insight” spoken at the trot sounds much like “hindsight” and, of course, vice versa. And “high insight” is an intelligent, eggcornish reworking of what must be, for some, a less familiar word…

While clearly with the benefit of high insight, we made mistakes in our lending and mortgage banking activities, so did most major industry players and our …
seekingalpha.com/article/ 76942-indymac-bancorp-inc-q1-2008-earnings-call-transcript – 100k – Cached


With the benefit of highinsight you think I should have known where this was going, but full marks to director David Fincher, who keeps you guessing until …
dvd.ciao.co.uk/Fight_Club__Review_5031080 – 50k – Cached


In high insight I don’t know if it was such a good idea. The marshmallow layer kept shifting the top cake and before I knew it my cake was 1/2 an inch off …
thefinned1.vox.com/library/posts/tags/baking/ – 110k – Cached


How many times can you recall an event in your life that in high insight the solution was so easy, but at the time it was so hard? Why is it hard? ...
awakenedmoms.com/ – 10k – Cached

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#3 2008-06-21 10:14:56

nilep
Eggcornista
Registered: 2007-03-21
Posts: 291

Re: hindsight vs highinsight

This is very nice. I think Peter’s high/deep semantic analysis is probably right on.

I find the string in high insight particularly strong evidence for the reshaping. The Davies/BYU corpus has 1,083 occurrences of hindsight, and a full 504 of them occur in the phrase in hindsight. An additional 66 are benefit of hindsight.

There is no high insight in the 360 million word corpus.

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#4 2008-06-21 10:19:15

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2850

Re: hindsight vs highinsight

Highinsight is better than foreignsight.


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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#5 2008-06-21 18:10:44

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2712
Website

Re: hindsight vs highinsight

Very good!

Another fun variant is the (attested) saying:

Hindsight is 50/50.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-06-21 18:33:18)


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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#6 2008-06-21 18:24:57

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2712
Website

Re: hindsight vs highinsight

It’s an odd fact that the vertical dimension admits of confusion in ways that the horizontal dimensions (intrinsically, one would think, more prone to confusion) do not. You don’t get left and right, or forward and back, or north and south, winding up as synonyms or used to modify each other like you do terms implying up and down or deep and high.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from something I’m working on. All the odd words and phrases are attested. (“Mondegrenosity” was a conscious coinage, and the mondegreens in that paragraph, as the wording suggests, were misbegotten by speech-recognition software rather than by people. All the others, including the up/down/height/depth/etc. phrases, are, as nearly as I or my correspondents could tell, either standard for the speakers/writers or intended as something normal, not as something funny. Doubtless there are some eggcorns in there that aren’t listed on the site yet …)

…Speech-reckonition software simularly takes mondegrenosity to new heights of depth. When 10 issues become tennis shoes, and interrogatories are in erotic Tories, or when someone who Saudi doctor is diagnosed with my true love pro laps and accordingly sent to the hospital in an amulets, the art of recognition has certainly been soared to newer and deeper heights

[this guy] takes grugs, and this last time he overdoped and went into a really deep high, had a sort of ’cedure and fell on the floor, and went into a comma. For all his roommate knew, he was having a grandmaw seizure, or a close procsimile thereof,

[I was] languashing in the dull drums. Every day I’d think it couldn’t get worse, and then by the end of the day I’d sink to new heights , and plumb the worst heights of despair. My bouts with antidepressance got worse and worst until I finally hit Bach Rodham. Right at that high ebb, when my peak of lowness hit, I felt like my life was falling apart at the bits and I was on the ring of disaster, like todally at the edge of my rope, all convinced that I was doomed for, and just hanging on by the skin of my fingernails. … [I needed to stop] trying to reach for pinnacles beyond my depth.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-06-21 22:08:01)


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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#7 2012-04-03 17:57:41

burred
Eggcornista
From: Montreal
Registered: 2008-03-17
Posts: 1112

Re: hindsight vs highinsight

Aha, so that’s where mondegrenous comes from – one of my favorite, though apparently already decaying, parts of the Tuggy-Schwieterman eggcorn exposition. Funny exchanges above. I got here from Kem’s link from the future. Looks like the right place to put the following weird things, for which I’m fairly sure there is no category/name — inexplicable substitution of foreign spelling for unrecognized part of word. Just part of their sightgeist I guess.

I use a aquafarm which in hindzeit is a stupid system.
Stoner grow-op forum

I know, it was a bad decision in hindzeit.
Hairdo

Hindzeit is 50/50.

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#8 2012-04-03 18:28:29

David Bird
Eggcornista
From: The Hammer, Ontario
Registered: 2009-07-28
Posts: 1690

Re: hindsight vs highinsight

Or we can be consistent and combine Heinz sight with Hindzeit to make heinzeit, for which there is first perp-son testimony available. About 12 real hits.

I too was surrounded by grim looking men in dirty clothes who demanded money. Later, in heinzeit, I now understand that they were just ordinary Havana guys, hanging out in the street, and that they just wanted to socialize but didn’t speak any english :-)
Trip report

Ah… In heinzeit, maybe it was a little strange for me to think a wheelchair bound person could build a wheelchair ramp.
Game forum

First person account

I used to think that hindsight was actually a German word, spelled something like “heinzeit,” that, loosely translated, meant “to reconsider.” In heinzeit, I was an idiot.
reddit eggcorn/grammar peeve thread

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