Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
For many English speakers the ‘t’ here is sounded as a ‘d’ so it is possible that some may see a short-lived craze or fad as the essential image within ‘infaduation’, infatuation being an irresistible but temporary passion. On the other hand it could be no more than a mis-spelling of course.
But then, after a while, the infaduation fades away, it gets boring, and another sexy guy comes around. What do you think will happen?” “Yeah, you’re right. ...
His hot shahawaat infaduation of marrying and divorcing women.Divorcing for them for reasons like she has a tatooo,she’s repulsiing after he’s consumated …
Everyone loves the infaduation part of love. . . the 5 hour phone calls, nicknames, the moments where you can never get your hands off of each others, ...
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Peter Forster wrote:
On the other hand it could be no more than a mis-spelling of course.
Yes, it is a misspelling. But there are different kinds of misspellings, and they are not all susceptible to the same explanations. I am not sure what “no more than a mis-spelling†means: it seems at least likely that every misspelling has an explanation and is to that extent more than just a bare, unexplained misspelling.
t for d is not a random mistake as if the word were infa&uation. It is not a fingerslip typo misspelling, at least not on a qwerty keyboard, as it might be if it were infaruation. t and d are very close phonetically, as are [tʃ] and [dÊ’] (the ch and j sounds of /t/ and /d/ before /u/ in this context), requiring considerable muscular control to systematically distinguish, and it seems very probable (as you note) that those who spell the word this way are spelling what they (sometimes or usually) actually pronounce, or at least what they know (at some cognitive level) they could well pronounce. If so that is eggcorn-like. There is quite possibly a blending with graduation—many people who haven’t learned differently in spelling class would probably say that infatuation and graduation rhyme quite exactly.
Anyway, if those writing it actually pronounce it that way and the spelling is mirroring the pronunciation, and/or if they spell it that way and think that is the right way to spell it, it would seem difficult for the word fad not to be activated as a component. If that is happening, yeah, you’ve got an eggcorn, it seems to me.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-11-09 09:06:29)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I’m not sure if Peter’s post was inspired by Pat’s…
“emphatuated” for “infatuated” by patschwieterman Slips, innovations and reshapings 2 2008-06-14 08:21:09 by
...but Peter has essentially located a distinct eggcorn possibility. I just wanted to include this other post for completeness.
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No Joe, I was away much of the summer so I might have missed Pat’s posting, or on the other hand I may simply have forgotten it.
David, all I meant by “no more than a mis-spelling” was that any eggcornish possibilities might be just coincidental. I often end a post that way and enjoyed your comments so much that I will probably continue to do so.
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