Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
‘Monokini’ is an established term of fashion and gets over 700,000 ghits.
To invent the word ‘monokini’ someone must have seen the ‘bi-’ in ‘bikini’ as a prefix meaning ‘two’ (and contributing to the meaning of ‘bikini’ as ‘two piece bathing suit.’) There’s an eggcorn in there somewhere.
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I was convinced Language Log had picked this up a while ago, but this doesn’t seem to have been the case. What stuck to my mind must have been a 1999 On Language column by Safire, dealing with mono-, bi- and trikinis.
The reinterpretation follows the eggcorn pattern, though with marketers better be doubtful about this being inadvertent.
Edit: This blog post by Bob Kennedy points to a discussion on ADS-L.
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klakritz wrote:
To invent the word ‘monokini’ someone must have seen the ‘bi-’ in ‘bikini’ as a prefix meaning ‘two’ (and contributing to the meaning of ‘bikini’ as ‘two piece bathing suit.’)
The someone appears to be Rudi Gernreich, inventor of the monokini (and, Wikipedia claims, the thong bathing suit – who knew?). Gernreich’s monokini appeared in 1964, which is also the year of the earliest uses of the word recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary.
1964 Daily Mirror (Brisbane) 6 July 6 Monokinis are selling in Paris like iceboxes in Alaska. 1964 Time 7 Aug. 36/3 Sunbathing.., she in a bikini.., he in a monokini.
Resegmenting bikini as bi + kini certainly works as a folk etymology, but as Chris suggests, it probably originated as a self-conscious joke or marketing scheme.
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Then there’s the “tankini”—a two-piece swimming suit whose hip-length top gives it a visual effect more like a tank swimsuit’s than a bikini’s.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/5a2hso
(a style especially useful for little kids, bcs the full coverage eliminates some sunburn risk, but bathroom breaks don’t require a complete disrobe the way one-piece suits do)
And I’m pretty sure the tankini was a marketing joke.
Last edited by TootsNYC (2008-08-21 09:53:56)
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It seems to be a pretty productive stem—there’s also
brakini
mankini [made famous by Borat]
microkini
skirtkini
stringkini
thongkini
unikini [For people who prefer Latin stems to Greek ones? Maybe this is different from the monokini—I didn’t click on any pictures.]
There are some others that get just a tiny smattering of hits—dresskini, shirtkini, etc. Someone more plugged into the world of fashion could probably find a lot more.
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<i>I didn’t click on any pictures.</i>
There’s restraint for ya!
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Unikini — sounds like the deepest of umbilici.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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