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#1 2008-10-10 09:01:07

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2714
Website

rage war < wage war

This is a very common malapropism (145k raw ghits, though by no means all are this error). The verb wage is rather archaic, so ripe for reinterpretation. The new imagery is clear, I think: the connection between anger or rage and fighting is pretty obvious; the verb form of rage needs only to be extended to transitive usage (a kind of adjustment we make easily in English), and there you have it.

To do this, Hitler would have to rage war with the USSR. To get to the USSR, they would have to go through Poland,

That was the ideology that drove him to bomb American targets, it is the ideology he has taken to America’s classrooms (which are just a different front in the same war he has been raging against our society for 40 years), it is the ideology he has never hidden from anyone,

yet those who rage war refuse to see the fruit they seek has already grown it is already a forest spreading civilization to the world

In the pits below Lucions temple they rage war on one another fuor sheer fun and once they are all dead they are ressurcted to repeat the

Quotes and Sayings. When the rich rage war, it’s the poor who die.—John-Paul Satre. Activist Email. Email Login.

The solution to the lack of available people to rage war was simple. Almost over night Solarian soldiers were replaced with machines.

Might be some dissimilation (avoiding the alliteration) going on, and/or anticipation of the r of war. The relationship between [w] and® in English is especially close (as attested by Elmer Fudd when he twies to say r).

Related:

This guy has lost every election he’s ever raged.

Blending with “run (an election)” may be involved in this case.


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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#2 2008-10-11 21:56:09

jorkel
Eggcornista
Registered: 2006-08-08
Posts: 1456

Re: rage war < wage war

Hi David:
We had a little discussion of wage/rage before…

WAGER war (wage) by jorkel Contribute! 2 2007-09-27 01:59:46 by AdamVero
The war wages on by onlywayne Contribute! 2 2006-09-20 16:30:11 by jorkel

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#3 2008-10-12 10:27:37

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2714
Website

Re: rage war < wage war

Thanks, missed those.

They’re relevant to this eggcorn, but don’t deal with it directly. For me, anyway, the war wages on and wager war are different enough to merit separate entries.

As a general principle, the substitution of structure (word/morpheme/phrase) X for structure Y in context Z may well not be the same error as substitution of X for Y in context Q. If X can be substituted for Y in any and every context, we may well just say it is X for Y and leave it at that. But most of the time there are particular contexts where this is more likely to happen, and X for Y may be eggcornish (because it makes sense) in on context but not in another.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-10-12 11:18:40)


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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