Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Amidst all the discussions in the Petty Annie and Pokeman threads about whether proper nouns have meaning (and what kind of meaning), and what constitutes an adequate “imagery shift†to qualify a structure for eggcornhood:
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Consider the following example:
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As you drive along a particular road that I know, you will come across a sign announcing Camp Creek . My English-language syntactic system allows two parses of this structure, with no (necessary or strong) differences in pronunciation between them. The parses can be made to work with the same denotations of the words Camp and Creek in both instances.
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It may be naming a small running body of water, in which case Creek is the head and Camp is an identifying modifier. This would be structurally like Mississippi River, Bullhead City, Washington State, Biscayne Bay, etc.
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It may be naming a place where people (likely military personnel or youth) were or may be still in non-permanent residence. In that case, Camp is the head and Creek is an identifying modifier of some sort (perhaps involving reference to a body of running water or to Creek Indians). This would be structurally like Fort Ord, Key West, Cape Hatteras, Mount Mitchell, etc.
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The question: Assuming (1) that one of the above parses was intended by those naming the place and understood by most others, and assuming (2) that someone (ignorantly and repeatedly, long-term) assumes the other parse to be correct
— is it an eggcorn?
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My answer: —yes. I think the syntactic shift is an acceptable kind of imagery change.
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(Lifting high the banner of Sane Annie Lehmann.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-02-04 12:54:20)
*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 remember when I was a kid seeing a handpainted sign for a place I wanted to visit – camp firewood.
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A few years ago my family-easterners all- were driving up the beautiful coastal highway from LA to San Francisco. We kept driving past road signs announcing that a ‘vista point’ was just ahead. After a while, one of us remarked how odd it was that so many California towns were named ‘Vista Point.’
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I would say that Camp Creek could certainly be an eggcorn (or what I would call stealth eggcorn) because we have a shared notion of what a camp is and what a creek is.
On the other hand…
Have you ever had one of those experiences in which someone comes up to you in a crowd—either looking for someone in particular or not—and says something like: “Is your name Steve?” Then, after telling him that you are not, he apologizes saying, “Sorry, you just looked like a Steve.”
Perhaps this would be an instance in which an image is attributed to a proper name with insufficient cause. A person named “Steve” might just as easily been named “Paul” or “Tom”—so there shouldn’t be anything truly fixed about the name in our collective minds. I’m not sure how this fits into the eggcorn picture, but I just wanted to toss it out.
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klakritz wrote:
A few years ago my family-easterners all- were driving up the beautiful coastal highway from LA to San Francisco. We kept driving past road signs announcing that a ‘vista point’ was just ahead. After a while, one of us remarked how odd it was that so many California towns were named ‘Vista Point.’
This reminds me a little bit of something I experienced as a kid… I kept seeing a listing in the local newspaper’s weekly TV section for show that sounded intriguing… I figured it had to be some kind of news show or public affairs program, locally produced, and the strange thing was it never seemed to have a set schedule, appearing at various odd times and even on different channels… but somehow I never managed to catch it, it kept getting pre-empted whenever I tried to tune it in – something else was always running instead.
It was called “To Be Announced…”
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Craig:
I’ve had that same experience, but it was better disguised…
I think it might have been abbreviated as TBA
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