Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The database already contains ‘trite and true’ but this is also very common:
Yet though the story is tired and true, Vivaldi’s music is real and vibrant and as attractive as anything in his instrumental works. ...
music.barnesandnoble.com/Vivaldi-Griselda/Jean-Christophe-Spinosi/e/709861304196/
Both games contain interesting twists to tired and true formulae, such as the tetris like patterns of Bejewled, or the mah-jong tile matching skill required …
www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=6942
Maybe it’s the tired and true Hollywood adage that rich people aren’t really happy or some other artifically flavored shit on a sugar cone.
www.bigempire.com/filthy/igbygoesdown.html
Stick with your tired and true perfect fitting t-shirt.
www.xiamenguide.com/forums/index.php?au … owentry=75
They hit the road and play the summer shed circuit with a fairly tired and true routine.
www.entertainmenttoday.net/
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“Tired and true” conveys some of the same imagery as “trite and true,” doesn’t it? Both seem semantically distant from “tried and true.” Almost too far to be eggcorns.
“Trite and true,” as the database discussion notes, may be an idiom blend of “trite, but true” and “tried and true.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I’m surprised to find myself arguing—in response to Kem, no less—that something seems reasonably within the sematic ballpark for an eggcorn. But “tired and true” doesn’t bother me as a substitution for “tried and true”—the maintenance of the “true” helps balance any potentially critical resonance that might creep in here. And there may be unconscious support for this coming in from different quarters—things that are “trying” are often things that are “tiring.” Works for me.
“Tired and true” (241k) gets far more hits than “trite but true” (21k). That doesn’t mean that the first couldn’t have arisen as a blend involving the second, but I’d be surprised if that were the case.
If the hits for this weren’t so huge, I’d be worried about typos. I write “tired” for “tried” all the time because the i and r are on different hands and I’m really bad at timing when typing. But many dozens of thousands of people must have meant “tired.”
The Database article on “trite” is also interesting because Chris seems to soften her view of the eggcorn/idiom blend divide just a bit.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-09-09 23:55:18)
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“the maintenance of the “true†helps balance any potentially critical resonance that might creep in here”
Hmm. That may be the case. It seems to be an eggcorn in your “messy area,” so it’s not a very good one. But it has some claim to eggcorn status.
“I’m surprised to find myself arguing—in response to Kem, no less—that something seems reasonably within the sematic ballpark for an eggcorn.”
Good for you. That didn’t hurt a bit, did it?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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For me, that balancing effect I talked about keeps it out of the messy zone—I find it solid enough as an eggcorn. And its google numbers are almost puzzlingly large, which lends added interest.
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Coming from a critic, “tired and true” would surely be an intentional play on “tried and true” to imply “a reliable idiom so often repeated that it may have become a tedious cliché” or slightly more negative than “well-worn,” whereas “tried and true” generally has a positive meaning in criticism, sometimes a synonym for “classic” or “favorite.” Critics use this kind of subtlety of word choice so often that I have a hard time imagining a critic using such different phrases as “tried and true” and “tired and true” interchangeably.
The one case klakritz cites that isn’t from a critic also contains the line, “Without a 10 year old concert t-shirt, how does anyone know how far back your love of the singer goes?” Also, the phonetic distance between “tired” and “tried”, at least in the New York and Los Angeles accents that a lot of these critics converse in, is pretty large. And so I have to say the evidence for “tired and true” occurring as an eggcorn is pretty thin.
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