Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Just stumbled upon this one. People substituting nether for never.. when searching “nether the less” within quotes to narrow down the results, Google still finds a whopping 13,600 results.
“Nether the less it’s a very good album and one of the best of 2006.”
http://www.mp3.com/artist/lupe-fiasco/r … 610&flag=3
“My owner Darren seems to care for me but nether the less he leaves me in the car all the time and whilst I don’t need food or water it would be nice if he …”
http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Gulliver-The-Pup/
The imagery is tough to be sure of, but people could be conflating the meaning of nether (below, under, hidden, submerged) with “less”. Almost as if “nether” is meant to emphasize “less.”
Makes me wonder how many other sayings out there that contain the word “never” have a “nether” variation.
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Many BrEnglish speakers would, and do, pronounce ‘nether’ as ‘never’, hence ‘never regions’ for ‘nether regions’ in the database. There klakritz observed a ‘neither regions’ variant, and oddly enough there are over 700,000 ghits for “neither the less”. I wonder whether ‘nether’ for ‘never’ may be an instance of hypercorrection by those who know they habitually sound such words ‘incorrectly’?
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Hypercorrection, and the influence of the /th/ in “the”. So, not really an eggcorn, though it might become one, if people try to explain why they use “nether”.
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Dadge wrote:
Hypercorrection, and the influence of the /th/ in “the”. So, not really an eggcorn, though it might become one, if people try to explain why they use “nether”.
Yeah, you’re probably right.
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I thought I’d resurrect this thread because I just encountered this one for the first time:
“Happy Christmas everyone… bit ba humbug myself about this festive season, nether-the-less I’ll be magnanimous enough to wish you all good cheer.”
I don’t think the meaning connection is there to make it an eggcorn.
The writer is a Welsh woman, so we may perhaps chalk up this misuse, and her misspelling of “bah”, to English being her second language after Welsh. Then again, she usually writes like a native English speaker.
Dixon
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You certainly don’t need a different first language to mis-spell ‘bah’ – there are ba, bar and baa humbugs aplenty and although many are deliberate wordplay, many appear not to be. (Dickens might have been a little upset at all the pole-dancing and surly drinking-joints his Scrooge has begot, but I’m sure he’d have appreciated, at this holiday season, a “chewish plush toy” called “Baa Mitzvah.”)
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