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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Our local newspaper published an editorial about Obama’s election victory in the States, and wondered, among other things, whether he would have any luck in finding Osama Bin Laden, who was described as the “world champion in hiding ghost seek!”.
The game was always hide-and-go-seek when I was a child, though I notice there is a book whose title is Hide and Ghost Seek. Has anyone else come across this usage?
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Excellent find! The notion of hiding ghosts that you go seek is a great one.
And welcome, Lyall!
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-11-17 13:19:59)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Three examples on the web that look genuine (i.e., not jokes): http://www.google.ca/search?q=“hiding+ghost+seek”
Possibly this substitution is influenced by a children’s book, published about fifteen years ago, called Hide and Ghost Seek: http://www.amazon.com/Hide-Ghost-Seek-A … 0448404753
Last edited by kem (2008-11-16 21:01:35)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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In print! You found it in print!
Oh my goodness, that’s a great eggcorn.
It is SO much more fun than the old term.
What’s the name of your local paper?
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Welcome, LyallP!
Your “hiding ghost seek” is a great eggcorn which I haven’t encountered before.
Like you, I and my friends called it “hide and go seek” when I was a kid. But later I found that many (most?) people called it just “hide and seek”. Googling, I find that “hide and go seek” gets about 155,000 hits, while “hide and seek” gets about 4,400,000, so apparently “hide and seek” is the more common form. Assuming it’s a regional difference, I’m curious—where did you grow up using the term “hide and go seek”? I grew up in southwestern Michigan; maybe it’s a Midwestern thing, or…?
I’d like to hear from more of you where you grew up and which form of the term was used there—the version with “go” in it, or the version without.
Dixon
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I grew up with a sort of internationalized American English (my grandparents were from Colorado and California, I lived a year or two each in CA and SC as a child, and we traveled a lot of other places in the US, mostly we were overseas.) It was always “hide-and-go-seekâ€, though I learned “hide-and-seek†fairly early through books (e.g. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ). I’m sure I, like others, sometimes thought (eggcornishly) that it was “hiding-go-seek†(about 1K ghits).
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Dixon Wragg wrote:
I’m curious—where did you grow up using the term “hide and go seek”? I grew up in southwestern Michigan; maybe it’s a Midwestern thing, or…?
Dixon, I grew up in Michigan also, and I’m pretty sure we always said “hide and go seek.” So perhaps it is regional or the “go” was lost over the years. As I have lived different places in my life (Michigan, Illinois, and now Colorado) I find myself wondering if the differences in culture, driving habits, and other behaviors are due to a different location or to the passage of time. I’m not sure which one (or both) causes “hide and go seek” vs. “hide and seek.”
Feeling quite combobulated.
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I grew up in northern California, and I’m pretty sure we only called it “hide and seek.” I’m familiar with “hide and go seek” now, but my guess is that that would have struck me as odd when I was a kid.
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TootsNYC wrote:
In print You found it in print
Oh my goodness, that’s a great eggcorn.
It is SO much more fun than the old term.
What’s the name of your local paper?
The paper is called Porirua CityLife. It is a small, free, community newspaper for Porirua, New Zealand.
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JonW719 wrote:
Dixon Wragg wrote:
I’m curious—where did you grow up using the term “hide and go seek”? I grew up in southwestern Michigan; maybe it’s a Midwestern thing, or…?
Dixon, I grew up in Michigan also, and I’m pretty sure we always said “hide and go seek.” So perhaps it is regional or the “go” was lost over the years. As I have lived different places in my life (Michigan, Illinois, and now Colorado) I find myself wondering if the differences in culture, driving habits, and other behaviors are due to a different location or to the passage of time. I’m not sure which one (or both) causes “hide and go seek” vs. “hide and seek.”
I live and grew up in New Zealand. As a boy in the 1960s it was “hide and go seek”, but I am familiar with ‘hide and seek”. As David Tuggy says, I also probably thought of it as hiding go seek when I was young.
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I’m bringing this one up for more adulation. An unfamiliar, perfect eggcorn dug up from the catacombs of 2008.
Alberta was hide-and-go-seek all the way.
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