Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Google counts on July 12, 2008:
11,800 “Main Street America”
42,500 “Mainstream America”
Analysis by Joe Krozel
I’m not sure which of these two expressions predates the other; they both have a familiar ring. (I thought “Main Street America” might be the original because it has a socioeconomic meaning that lends itself to historical discussions).
Now, the question becomes: How exactly are these expressions related to one another? For some utterers, it may simply be an idiom blend: placing “mainstream” into the “Main Street America” mold (because that mold suggests itself on a subliminal level). For others, it may be inattentive listening: although they would clearly understand the difference between “Main Street” and “mainstream,” they assume one word or the other based on the majority of phonemes; Clearly “t” and “m” sound nothing alike, but inattentive listening seems to be a legitimate source for an eggcorn. It really comes down to the utterer being unfamiliar with the idiom at hand I suppose.
Plenty of room for others to shed some light on this. Perhaps we can drag out a few examples as needed.
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I’m not sure that either construction is a reworking of the other, though their ubiquity might be mutually reinforcing. Their meanings are rather similar, at least in reference if not completely in extent.
For what it’s worth, the Oxford English Dictionary dates the figurative sense of main street from 1855. That’s a century earlier than the adjective sense of mainstream (1958), but two centuries later than the noun (1599). Details follow.
The first sense of main street given by OED is “The principal street of a town, esp. in North America.” The second sense is relevant to “main street America.”
2. fig. The mediocrity, parochialism, or materialism regarded as typical of small-town life (esp. after Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street, 1920).
[1855 N.Y. Tribune 31 Dec. 4/4 It has risen to its present position of bloated arrogance and swaggering insolence by the liberal and unstinting patronage it has received from the full purses and free hands of Eastern men in Main street and elsewhere.]
This quotation, and indeed the definition, have a negative connotation not usually present in “main street America”, however.
In similar fashion, the first sense given for mainstream is “The principal stream or current (of a river, etc.).” The second sense is perhaps relevant to mainstream America.
2. In extended use: the prevailing trend of opinion, fashion, society, etc.
1599 Warning for Faire Women II. 3 You have..by gradations seen how we have grown into the main stream of our tragedy. 1831 CARLYLE in Foreign Q. Rev. VIII. 355 But after Luther’s day, the Didactic Tendency again sinks to a lower level; mingles with manifold other tendencies; among which, admitting that it still forms the main stream, it is no longer so pre-eminent, positive, and universal, as properly to characterize the whole.
I don’t really see that first quotation as relevant to mainstream America; the second quotation, from 1831, is perhaps more relevant, but still doesn’t seem a good match.
The adjective form of mainstream is the one at work in mainstream America. Once again, the first sense is literal (“Designating smoke produced by a cigarette, cigar, or pipe that is directly inhaled by the smoker. Freq. in mainstream smoke. Cf. sidestream smoke”). The relevant sense is the third one.
3. Of or relating to the mainstream; belonging to or characteristic of an established tradition, field of activity, etc.; conventional.
1958 ‘E. CRISPIN’ Best SF Three 9 Main~stream fiction..has been almost uniformly catatonic in its withdrawal from environment.
Thus, the relevant usage of mainstream is dated nearly a century after the figurative usage of main street. But rather than developing from figurative main street, it probably developed from the noun mainstream.
Each of the figurative usages seems to have developed independently. Each seems readily, and independently, available for the description of mainstream / Main Street America.
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