Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Backing up any tree is counter-indicated; backing up the wrong tree is perilous indeed. The metaphorical image of a clueless dog that doesn’t know what tree his quarry is in seems to have been lost here – it’s replaced by the picture of a clueless person who’s about to break his or her fool neck. I thought I’d hit paydirt when I saw the 2400 raw hits, but they reduce to a mere 16 unique, and not all of those are the target phrase. Examples:
I tried going back in the thread to pages 30-40 and didn’t find it. I guess I have to go through the whole thing again, but before I do, am I backing up the wrong tree?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=197102&page=41
Giselle has been trying to get married since she was 20, so Brady is backing up the wrong tree if he thinks he wants to play bachelor and have fun…
http://www.hollyscoop.com/tom-brady/tom … 12488.aspx
All very nice but someone should explain to Mr. Gore that he is backing up the wrong tree. Outside his own country he should be lecturing India and especially China. As a percentage Britain’s contribution to world pollution is like a ‘pee one fifty five’ in the ocean.
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/ViewArt … id=3338564
[“P 155”? Took me a second to get the “piss” euphemism.]
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Blended with “backing the wrong horse”?
Another blended version is among my favorites: barking up left field. Those are the kind that just come out of the left blue yonder and smack you upside the face, and you say Awww. Awesome!
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I think I have posted before one of my fav blends, “barking up the wrong alley.”
I don’t think Pat’s eggcorn is an idiom blend with “backing the wrong horse.” But there may be a blend with “backing up.”
Prepositional verbs such as “backing up” are betweenish idioms in English. Germans just plunk them in front of their verbs and make new words. Compilers of English idioms often omit them. But they fit most definitions of “idiom.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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The possibility of a blend hadn’t occurred to me. I agree with Kem—I don’t think “backing the wrong horse” is at work here, but there may be more possibilities worth exploring in that direction.
I had wondered whether this was another case where a speaker of a non-rhotic dialect would be more likely to eggcorn the phrase. For me, the vowels in “bark” and “back” are pretty different, but I’m not sure that’s true in, say, many British dialects. I’m not sure, though, and at present I don’t have access to my beloved OED.
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“Barking up the wrong tree” and “backing the wrong horse” are in fact very similar in meaning: they share the notion of (ignorantly) pursuing a course of action that will not produce the desired effects. It’s when idioms are so nearly synonymous, i.e. when you are likely to be pawing around in the semantic area where both reside, looking for an idiom to throw into your conversation, that you get the most idiom blends.
“Backing up” for me seems less likely because it doesn’t have that kind of synonymy—the problem with those barking up wrong trees or backing wrong horses is precisely that they don’t back up, reverse their course of action, though the situation, rightly perceived, would warrant such backing up.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-08-24 16:57:52)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Well, it’s probably impossible to solve this one. But my language intuition screams that a blend with “backing the wrong horse” is almost impossibly unlikely here. I think that that “back up” construction is going to speak powerfully to people as a reference to movement when it’s combined with “tree.” And the idea of “supporting the wrong tree”—which your argument seems to imply—is maybe just a little too bizarre even when you’re trying to conjure up a picture of perverse wilfulness.
Nothing seems terribly unlikely to me about the picture of backing up a tree in this context—it’s a very nice portrait of someone doing something dangerous, stupid and ill-advised. And I’d turn your logic around (or sideways?): the use of “backing” implies that the person in question should instead be facing the right way—like their critics. Sorry, but I’m as unpersuaded as I can be.
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If it’s a blend, you don’t expect it to necessarily be making sense in the way an eggcorn (by definition) must. There’s no need for a blender to be thinking of “supporting the tree†(—let alone the fact that a bettor doesn’t “support†the horse that he backs—), any more than for the guy barking up left field to be lower than left field. To me the close semantic similarity, coupled with the syntactico-phonological similarities in “trsnv-vb[bark/back (up)] the wrong Noun”, make it very likely that people would get the two mixed together, and that it would happen independently a dozen times in a corpus as vast as Google’s doesn’t surprise me at all.
I’m still convinced that this kind of a blend is a real possibility for producing this particular phrase, and secondarily for some people’s (including my, but apparently not your) understanding it. I agree with you that for other listeners (including you, and me too), the idea of climbing rear-end-first up the tree is bound to come to mind when they hear the phrase. Just as the idea of left field being tilted so that you can bark up it comes to mind in interpreting “bark up left field.†But I don’t think it was likely to be an important idea in the production of the blend.
Blends often involve quite bizarre images in hearers’ minds, while in the perpetrators’ minds they felt perfectly normal. My wife just today said “I’m going to take the bull by the hands and call herâ€. I of course got this picture of her trying to dance holding the front hooves of a bull. She can see that when it’s pointed out to her, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t (at least at all prominently) in her mind when she produced the blend. What was happening in her mind was an attempt to come up with the/an idiom meaning “deal decisively with an issue I’m tempted to put off or avoidâ€, which resulted in coming up simultaneously with “take the bull by the horns” and “take matters into my own hands/into handâ€, and then, having “that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mindâ€, she blent the two together, quite unaware of the delightful picture that produced. (fwiw 549 rghits on “bull by the handsâ€, over 1k on “bull by the handâ€. ( Later —ignore those numbers. They reduce to a very few that aren’t clearly purposeful.) Many are laughing at the phrase, likely in many cases in response to a real blend-error. E.g. “Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphorsâ€.)
Don’t know that any of the above will be persuasive, of course. If our language intuitions continue to scream opposite things, you’re doubtless right that it will be impossible to agree on this one (let alone solve it.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-08-24 18:35:14)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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There’s the possibility, I suppose, that people who say “backing up the wrong tree” have a database storage image in mind. (“Did you move the client directory to the tape last night?” asked the manager. Jack peered at the small print of the log file. “No, dang it! I backed up the wrong tree.”).
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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