Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
This is more of a hypothetical eggcorn than an observed one…
...as I’m not sure how I would go about spotting it in the wild…
Consider Practicable vs. Practical:
“Practical” is a much more familiar term than “practicable,”
and I dare say that the former is often used where the latter
is intended. MW points out “In spite of the common element
of meaning these terms are not interchangeable without loss
of precision of expression.”
Now, suppose the average person comes across a sentence
containing the word “practicable” and is asked to paraphrase.
I suspect the word would likely be replaced by “practical” and
an alteration in the meaning would result. That’s just my hunch.
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It seems to me that such a paraphrase would merely lose some nuance, or as MW suggests, “precision”. It would not reshape the semantics of the proposition in a very substantial way.
At any rate, the distinction between the two words seems to be all but lost to contemporary speakers/writers of English. A Google search for “is not practical” reveals – well, huge numbers of hits for “No Sir, Nihilism is not Practical,” which is apparently a song title. But removing these still leaves more than a million raw hits. From a brief skimming of the first twenty, fifteen seem to intend something like “is not feasible” (practicable), compared to one “is not in practice” (practical), and four that I couldn’t easily clock. If this is an eggcorn, it’s “nearly mainstream.”
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