Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
CDL Drivers Wanted Experienced Sewage Truck Drivers & A Tote Truck Driver Must Have Class A CDL with Tanker & Air Freights
A TOTE truck pulls a newer 53-foot trailer off the vessel MV Midnight Sun during an off-loading at the Port of Anchorage March 12.
I planned to take the VW to a place recommended by a tote truck operator named Jose. Then I spotted a beautifully restored red VW Beetle parked at my …
This is going to be the tote truck for my clubs N scale modules. [Pic is of a semi-tractor.]
He eventually went back to the tote truck driving job but he was. still having trouble. He continued having pain all through his leg,
Sort of like pain-staking , in that the phonological difference from the original (victim/kernel/whatchumacallit) is subtle and has to do with “juncture” or boundary pronunciation rather than phoneme identification.
Odd in that “tote” is (for me) neither much more common nor more salient than “tow”, and less clearly compatible with the overall meaning, though of course the reason to “tow” a vehicle is generally to “tote” it somewhere, or at least tote it away from where it is.
(Most ghits on tote-truck refer to something else, either something more like a fork-lift or a dolly, or some kind of container for toting things in a truck.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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How certain are you that this is a reshaping of tow truck >> tote truck?
Your third example (“a place recommended by a tote truck operator”) seems to intend tow truck, though not unambiguously so.
The first, second, and forth examples seem to mean semi-trailer tractor or something similar, and not necessarily tow truck.
The final example could, from this context, mean nearly any sort of truck.
I wonder if tote truck exists in some dialect or jargon that I don’t speak, with the meaning of “a truck for toting (trailers etc.),” distinct from tow truck as “a truck for towing (disabled vehicles, etc.).”
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nilep wrote:
How certain are you that this is a reshaping of tow truck >> tote truck? ¶ […] I wonder if tote truck exists in some dialect or jargon that I don’t speak, with the meaning of “a truck for toting (trailers etc.),” distinct from tow truck as “a truck for towing (disabled vehicles, etc.).”
If it does, and if it is a development from tow truck , wouldn’t that be an eggcorn? To me the idea of “toting” a trailer would involve picking it up off the ground and moving it in that way to another location. I would get a “tow” for a trailer, not a “tote”. But if I could call what is done to trailers “toting” then I could call what is done to disabled vehicles by the same name, even when they are still dragged off on their own wheels.
It would make more sense if the trucks that raise disabled vehicles onto a flatbed and carry them that way were called “tote trucks” and that method of transporting them “toting”, but I am not aware that it is.
Anyway, it seems a likely eggcorn to me.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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DavidTuggy wrote:
If it does, and if it is a development from tow truck , wouldn’t that be an eggcorn? To me the idea of “toting” a trailer would involve picking it up off the ground and moving it in that way to another location. I would get a “tow” for a trailer, not a “tote”.
I’m not convinced it is an eggcorn (though I’m not convinced that it’s not, either), but it does seem likely that tow truck had some influence on the form of tote truck, at least historically.
Since most of the examples of tote truck don’t seem to mean what tow truck means to me, however, this might be a historical eggcorn that has become simply conventional for a community of users. This state of affairs would be somewhat similar to chaise lounge.
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