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Chris -- 2018-04-11
On another topic, I recently wrote “Then our inveterate ingenuity in making some sort of sense kicks in.” I just realized this is the perfect context for another eggcornish structure I’ve run across: inventerate < inveterate.
In Tuesday’s court session, defense attorney David Moraghan, who represents James Luddy, called Brooks an inventerate liar and disputed almost every claim in the February statement.
[+] Inventerate liars. [+] Men claiming paternity of Anna Nicole Smith’s Daughter. [+] People so genial that anyone claiming to understand them is a liar .
Category:Inventerate liars. (repeated 2x)
An inventerate hustler and energetic maverick, He introduced a midget player (Eddie Gaedel), Bat Day, fireworks, exploding scoreboards and …
Like many eggcorns, it can easily be seen as a blend (of inveterate and invent(ive)). An inventerate liar is one who prolifically invents plausible stories, this particular inventerate hustler introduced all sorts of innovations, and so forth.
The opacity of inveterate (it means something like ‘since long ago, of old’, related to veteran and other forms) is certainly a factor.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-06-21 18:31:08)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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David,
I really like the incongruity of this one. ‘Inventerate’ – it combines the old with the new. Invent meaning fabricated, created, suggesting something new,
coupled with the meaning of ‘inveterate’ meaning longstanding, or habitual.
It was used as early as 1805. This being taken from a British history site verbatim in an Act by The Church of Scotland:
Deeply impressed with a sense of the invaluable blessings which our country has so long enjoued, under the operation of equal laws, and under your Majesty’s mild and ausoucious regin, we cannot look, without much anxiety, to the progress of a war in which the avowed design of our inventerate foe is the subversion of out liberty and independence.
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I’m a little suspicious of some of these old citations that you get on the Internet. A lot of times they seem to be scanned in and run through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program. E.g. in the same bit of text you had
your Majesty’s mild and ausoucious regin
for “auspicious reignâ€. Did these guys, writing a very formal document, really make those mistakes? I’d like some more evidence.
On the other hand, if you found it in a paper copy of the document then someone (either the authors or someone copying it later) did indeed make the mistake.
I hope it’s real!
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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David,
Mea Culpa! I should have cited the source; it looks very legit.
British History Online
British History Online is the digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust, we aim to support academic and personal users around the world in their learning, teaching and research.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/Default.aspx
I wonder if it’s not really a mistake at all but more due to vernacular?
Laura
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Yes, a cut above most. But an awful lot even of institutionally well-credentialed OCR stuff is pretty bad. Especially when the original is old and parts of it may be faded. So I’ll remain a bit skeptical.
Note enjoued for enjoyed: let the descender of the y fade to where the OCR program decides it’s a blotch rather than part of the text, and there (pretty near) you are.
It’s a frustration. When I’m trying to document some blooper, I fairly often find one of these cases, think “Yes, exactly what I want”, then really look at the document, and have to decide, “You know what, it’s pretty improbable. Better not cite it.”
In the case at hand: “ausoucious regin” a dialectal form for “auspicious reign”? Sounds terribly improbable to me, not least because both words are learned words, unlikely to be common in local patois, and both are words used in addressing and describing to his face a foreign sovereign—not situations in which you want to be caught mangling the sovereign’s language (still George III in 1805, the first of the Georges, I read, to speak English as his first language), or at any rate his courtiers’ language. Unless there’s evidence somewhere to support it, I have a hard time swallowing it.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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