Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
This one was posted on the “I Judge You When You Use Bad Grammar” Facebook group.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1 … 2209553478
If you can’t see the link it’s a screengrab from Yahoo answers –
[sic throughout!] “i have that camera too. what happened is probably becuase your hand or finger was applying force to the lens which automatically slowly comes out when you turn it on. so in laments terms—->dont wirry it happens all the time”
The original source is http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index … 853AA3iBqX
Last edited by PeteMella (2008-09-11 03:25:27)
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And a quick google search shows it’s surprisingly common…
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Welcome, Pete. As a non-Facebooker, I can’t see the example you mentioned in your first post. Can you copy and paste it into a new or revised post? Thanks!
Feeling quite combobulated.
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I’ve edited the original post accordingly.
What I really like is the assumption that the original answer is somehow too complicated or jargon-filled for laymen (or “laments”!) to understand!
Pete
Last edited by PeteMella (2008-09-11 03:26:56)
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Thanks, Pete. I loved the the next poster asked “WTF are lament’s terms?” :-) I am sort of assuming this is a mispelling and that the poster doesn’t think the word is pronounced “luh-MENT’s.” An ear spelling perhaps? Or perhaps the person has read the word lament but mispronounced it as LAY-muhnt.
Feeling quite combobulated.
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This one’s quite astonishing. We have, of course, in lame man’s terms—one of my early favourites. I’ll see that it gets a lamentable companion as soon as I get to it.
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I really like this one, too, but I’m wondering whether it’s truly an eggcorn—what’s the semantic justification here?
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I was wondering that too, on reflection. It does sound like someone may have purely heard the phrase “laymen’s terms” while being unfamiliar with the term “laymen”, filling in their own idea of what the word should be.
The only possible idea I can think of semantically is that someone may express some kind of lamentful regret at “dumbing down” their language (patronising, but no more than “lame man’s terms”!). This is clutching at straws a bit, though, and I suspect it’s just someone being a bit thick.
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