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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Although comments were closed for this entry, I would like to point out that I believe it makes perfect sense to use the form “strum up support” vs. “drum up support”. Clearly, the original idea was the use of beating a drum (perhaps in a military fashion) to gather an army/group of people for a cause. I can see no reason why the musical instrument must be a drum other than the association of the drums with the military. Is it not unreasonable, then, to think of “strum up support” via some other stringed instrument? Music through the centuries have been known to inspire and motivate (just look at the plethora of “national anthems”) and used to rally people to a cause, and not all of them have been based on drums.
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Welcome to the forum, hbien.
If anyone wants to look at the Database entry, here’s a link: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/928/strum-up/
hbien, the thrust of your remarks wasn’t clear to me. Are you saying that “strum up support” should be considered a standard phrase and therefore not an eggcorn? Or are you seconding the idea that the phrase is non-standard but makes such good sense that it deserves a place in the Database?
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I think hbien is making the leap that all GOOD eggcornologists make—the leap of NOT passing negative, snarky judgment on people who use the wrong term in good faith.
Many of us actually admire the eggcorns we see; we think they’re inventive, we think they make sense.
The true eggcornologist doesn’t say, “how stupid those people are, to use ‘strum’”; he said, “gee, that makes sense, I see how they got there.”
And that is what hbien is doing. Perhaps he (or she?) has been so inundated by the snarkists in the world that he (or she?) feels a need to defend the eggcorn users? (I know I am seized w/ that urge now and then)
Without perhaps realizing (it is his-or her?-first post with us) that nearly all of us here at the Eggcorn Forum actually share that accepting attitude.
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Strumming up support sounds like a hippie movement from the 1960’s: get everybody marching to the same guitar-beat (in the name of “doing your own thing”, of course). I like it!
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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