Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
It takes a lot of learning to get it that a bike is a bicycle, not a bycicle or bicicle or something. One might well conclude in the process that icycle is spelled to rime. (Classic hyper-correction.) A friend sent the first example following from an email he’d received: others are from the Internet. The photos referenced have nothing to do with bicycles, that I can see.
I always gaze in wonder as I see the beauty of a fresh snowfall, or icecycles hanging from the trees.
PARADE Magazine | Snapshotâ„¢ – Lonely Ice Cycle – [ Traducir esta página ] This was the only ice cycle I found on this stream. It dangled about 12 inches above the stream,
Windshield Ice cycle. Added by Cavsome on December 9, 2008 at 12:08am; View Photos · Previous | Next. Icycle on winshield,sycamore inbackground
[on ebay] Antique 20 Ice Cycle Shaped Prism Crystal Strings
Giant Ice Cycle….and growing | KATU.com – Portland, Oregon … – [ Traducir esta página ] I have a 3 foot tall window in my and i opened the blinds today to find this HUGE ice cycle hanging from the gutter.
Big Icecycle – [ Traducir esta página ] Big Icecycle. The only place I have seen any sign of a thaw for more than a week . The downspout is full of ice so it can’t drain.
As the examples show, the spelling is often repeated, a likely indication that it is standard. In one example it is icecycle one time and icycle the next. The examples also show a number of options for separating / combining and capitalizing the words.
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Both icycle and icecycle are used more often than not (at least on the first few googled pages) for conscious wordplay or for really talking about an ice cycle, either a bicycle equipped for riding on ice or a precipitation/freezing/melting cycle involving ice.
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But some examples, including those above, seem to me to be people simply trying to write the word they know, in what they think is the normal way. Some of this may be simply the hyper-corrective spelling—people also write bicycle by rote, without thinking of its composition from bi – and cycle . But some very likely think the word is composed of ice and cycle.
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If I could think of a really plausible semantic connection, I’d be inclined to accept it as an eggcorn. But all I come up with is some vague connection with the hydrological cycle: maybe because icicles form only where there is running water that then freezes, so it is when water is cycling from the liquid to the frozen state that you get them. Lacking a confession from one guilty of such perpitude, I’m screptical.
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Do any other connections occur to you all? Do they “run†down like a bicycle? ??
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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No problem—it’s a lovely one in its own right.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Check out both David (fishbait1)’s post on icesickle and Pat’s earlier post referenced on that same thread. It’s a different structure (and a more eggcornish one, I think, despite the lack of a curved blade), but similar to this one.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-02-01 23:27:30)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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