Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I first spotted it in my neighborhood association’s Google Group, but it appears to be quite common:
http://xicanista.blogspot.com/2006/09/s … y-mat.html
http://www.bizbuysell.com/listing-infor … 86546.html
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/laundrymat.html
It doesn’t seem fair to me to simply call it an error – I’d say it rises to eggcorn level by virtue of seeming to suggest something oddly different. What sort of mat does one do laundry on, I wonder?
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I don’t know if this is an eggcorn… “laundromat” was originally a trademark of the Westinghouse Corporation. I suspect it was derived from “automat,” a coin-operated restaurant, and I’d guess that came from shortening “automatic” or “automatic.” (The Dutch equivalent, called an Automatiek, is still operating today.) But the suffix “mat” is not used as commonly, and people wouldn’t know the trademark (which has been genericized), so they spell it the way it makes sense to them. There isn’t really a new meaning that comes about from laundry- vs. laundro-.
There is a short snippet of a four-page available here (http://www.jstor.org/pss/453073) that explores suffixes such as mat (“teria,” etc.). A partial continuation is available here: (http://www.jstor.org/pss/453644).
Last edited by JonW719 (2008-06-17 17:16:07)
Feeling quite combobulated.
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It seems to me that _-omat(ic)_, not just _-mat(ic)_ came to be a semi-productive suffix. Didn’t the Far Side have a cartoon about the “Doby-o-maticâ€, a gun that would launch a Doberman at an intruder? Anyway, laundry-mat would simply be using the shorter version of the suffix, rather than the longer version (with vowel deletion getting rid of the final _-y_).
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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For “Laundry mat” to qualify as an eggcorn, we’d need to articulate a convincing imagery for “mat”—an imagery that the utterer believes and which departs from the original -omat(ic?). I don’t see it just yet.
Last edited by jorkel (2008-06-17 23:34:11)
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I took a second look at this one (just now), and I think there is some merit to it. The -omat ending in “Laundromat” (short for -omatic, I suppose) was originally intended to point out the automated means of doing laundry. Over time, the word morphed to “Laundry mat” where “mat” conjures up the notion of a place …akin to a “pad”... so the term is now interpreted as a place to do laundry.
So, on second reading, I’m inclined to call this one an eggcorn, and a very good one at that if my analysis isn’t flawed somewhere.
Last edited by jorkel (2009-01-14 13:06:10)
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Do people use “mat†to mean “place� I don’t remember seeing that.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Not really, David, but isn’t that the image that it conjures in one’s mind?
I guess what I’m saying is that once the meaning ”-omatic” is lost, one turns to (imaginary) imagery for the “mat.” Though, I can understand that one may be skeptical about that for not being precise.
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Yes, it brings the image of a mat to my mind, and I don’t get a clear connection from that to the notion of a commercial establishment for doing laundry. In this way it’s like a normal malapropism or mondegreen, etc: it is clearly a mis-shaping, but not one that makes very good sense. Eggcorns do have to make sense, don’t they?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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When I was a kid, the ”-mat” suffix was still a bit productive, and I probably thought of laundromats and automats and coffeemats primarily as places; I doubt the “automatic” element of it was all that alive for me across the board. Today ”-mat” is so moribund that I actually had to go online to see if I was making up memories of the word “coffeemat.” Nope, there are a few citations that seem to be referring to shops with automatic coffee dispensers or to the machines themselves, but at least a couple of the handful appear to be from science fiction stories. And that seems to be about the only remaining habitat of the word “foodmat,” too. In any case, while I have something of the same associations with ”-mat” as Joe does, I doubt they can be used to bolster the eggcornicity of this reshaping; we wordnerds are probably about the only ones who remember the other ”-mats” and can make that link.
Thinking about words like this reminds me of all those old-fashioned visions of the future they were always feeding us during my childhood. In the 70s, the goofy documentaries we watched at school on rainy days (it still rained in California in the 70s) always seemed to be talking about “the world of tomorrow” or “a tomorrow in which robots will wash our clothes and prepare our food…..” Today that use of “tomorrow” as a synonym for “the future” paradoxically fills me with nostalgia.
Last edited by patschwieterman (2009-01-16 14:16:50)
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