Eggcorn Forum

I’m quite struck by that penultimate example.

also there are more than one infantadas ..the one you’re referring to is the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

I wonder how the contributor got both the reshaped infantada and the standard intifada in the same sentence? I can imagine a couple of possibilities. The user may know both forms, but see them as different – perhaps seeing the first is an English loan word and the second as transliterated Arabic. Or, the user may have typed infantada but cut and pasted Al-Aqsa Intifada from some online source. Or one of the instances may have been an error (a misspelling or a typo or what have you). This last possibility seems unlikely, though, since infantada appears again later. That would make intifada the error, coincidentally identical to the standard form.

Also, it’s striking that s/he glosses infantada as “ebb and tide of violence”, and not as anything to do with infants. This seems like counter-evidence to the word’s eggcornicity for this particular speaker. It also differs from the usual definitions of intifada as either “shaking off” or “a rebellion involving Palestinians/Arabs.”

Nilep—yeah, you’re obviously right about the 4th one; it’s not an example of the eggcorn. I included it in my first collection of cites a month ago exactly because it was so puzzling (I gave it multiple sentences to highlight that), and then didn’t read it again and cut it or gloss it before posting. I assumed the first use of “infantadas” here was mocking the use of the term earlier in the same thread (my memory is that it’s used in one of the posts right before this one, but this annoying library browser won’t let me check without losing my whole post)—but the reversion back to the reshaping after making the point with the std form is strange enough to make your guesses as good as any. I was intrigued enough to read the guy’s (gal’s?) other posts on that thread, and I find him/her striking in more than just the use of “infantada”—a rare instance of a person on a discussion forum who’s both fiercely partisan in some respects and carefully even-handed in others. Sort of refreshing but hard to parse. And the poster’s handle—CptStern (or was that Cpl?)—made me wonder whether this is a member of the Israeli military. Maybe that explains their confidence in giving a translation of the Arabic word (apparently hard to translate) very different from the usual ones. (By the way, Nilep, here’s how I compile cites in posts: when I’m first putting a post together, I put the ones that seem like eggcorns at the beginning, and the ones that aren’t but are interesting at the end. I usually try to get three fairly unquestionable cites in before the puzzling or intentional ones. In the old days, before you showed up, I usually didn’t bother to explain this, and it generally wasn’t a problem—many of my pre-Nilep posts have unglossed questionable/puzzling/non-eggcornish cites at the end of the examples. Early in your tenure on the forum, however, you went surprisingly ballistic about one of my cites that was near the end of the list (hey, how about posting an eggcorn of your own once in a while…), and after that I’ve tried to remember to gloss those before posting to avoid a repeat. I regret the error this time, but you’ll find that most of the time my weird ones come after at least three less questionable ones.)

Jorkel—a really nice find. That never occurred to me.

This is a superb flounder eggcorn. And antifada is equipotent.

Over a hundred ghits for “intifatah.” This is a bit eggcornish in English, confusing the name of the Palestinian political party (Fatah) with a piece of the Arabic word “intifada.” Supposedly the word “Fatah,” an acronym, is also an Arabic word meaning “open,” so it may be an eggcorn in Arabic as well (assuming any Arabic speakers actually make the mistake).

Last edited by kem (2008-07-29 19:27:56)

On second thought, “infantida” may not be a full-fledged flounder. I wasn’t thinking of “ada” as an idiomatic context, but it certainly could be. As well as the “in-.”

One thing that has become clear to me recently is that the context of the switched word in an eggcorn is not clearly defined. It can be as tight and obvious as a non-parsable idiom (e.g., “crutch of the matter”) or it can be as loose and concealed as the multitude of sentence permutation that allow “hawk” and “hock” to be switched. We would not expect a switch of “crux” and “crutch” outside of the idiom “X of the matter” to be an eggcorn. With “hawk” and “hock,” we would expect most switches to be eggcorns-almost every context would be a possibility. But not every context. If someone wrote “carnival hocker,” we would probably not call it an eggcorn, nor would we lightly admit “Jeremy is deeply in hawk to Paul the pawn broker.” So “hawk” and “hock” are only interchangeable within certain syntactic and semantic ranges. Which is another way of saying that even flounders such as hawk/hock have a context. And since it is the presence of a context that differentiates eggcorns from flounders, flounders are eggcorns. I can only imagine that Zwicky, by saying that flounders were not eggcorns, wanted to raise the profile of the idiomatized eggcorns. But the line he draws is, from a theoretic standpoint, a line in the sand. We could populate every band of the spectrum that reaches from pure flounder to pure eggcorn with appropriate examples.