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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I attended a very smart and well-presented lecture this evening – during the course of which I clearly heard the speaker use the phrase “an ongrowing process.†That may simply have been the result of a momentary neurocognitive misfire, but the sequence “an ongrowing†gets 414/149 rgh/ugh online. Finding the target reshaping is a little trickier, however. Aquaculturists use the term “ongrowing†in their technical vocabulary; it seems to mean raising fish or other sea creatures at an underwater site in cages or pens rather than in onshore tanks. (If anyone else can be more precise, I’d like to hear about it.) And a lot of people use “ongrowing†when they very clearly mean “growing.†This usage is arguably eggcornish, but it might also be arguably malapropic in some cases. The problem is that the semantic overlap between “ongoing†and “growing†is actually pretty large – many things that go on tend to grow as they do so. The citations below seemed to me instances in which “ongoing†would have been a quite natural choice, but there’s clearly room for various types of argument with this one. Examples:
Lessons Learned: The need of easily access to various types of information, is an ongrowing issue.
http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstr … 17834.html
[“Easily” belongs to a surprisingly common type of typo (and I mean “typo”) in which adjectives and adverbs are substituted for each other.]
I mean it’s fairly logical solution to an ongrowing problem and frankly I feel as though we are still in the stone age of technology where as someone from Korea or Japan could use their cellphones for almost anything, starting up your car, turning on a/c, etc, short of feeding your dog.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2005/08/twofac … and-g.html
Maybe because towards the middle of the track things go awkward: sounds like someone’s having some technical problems, as an ongrowing stereo “clicking†sets in.
http://www.mangenerated.com/blog/?p=161
Because of an ongrowing demand for the metal, fueled mostly by such popular gaming consoles as the Playstation, it has become a new kind of “black gold” for third world countries, namely the Congo and Rwanda.
http://www.pollsb.com/polls/p2035650-we … ation_wars
The design of the cages used for the ocean nursery phase is an ongrowing process.
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:HQf … =firefox-a
[This is from an aquaculture post, but it seems to be an instance of the target reshaping. Maybe the other use of “ongrowing” influenced the writer here.]
I’m 50 and I still haven’t “turned out”...that’s an ongrowing process in my view and the verdict isn’t in until I die!
http://dpsql.vpi.net/messageboard_archi … ID=546&P=4
The following is a before/after entry from the history of the Wikipedia article on the Oregon band Kaddisfly. The person who edited the passage clearly felt “ongrowing†was basically a synonym for “growing.†The use of “urges†is also cool. And I misunderstood the passage at first, since “repressed†and “re-pressed†are almost antonyms in this case; that problem remains.
In 2007, due to several urges from an ongrowing fanbase, the band repressed Did You Know People Can Fly? for those people who missed out during 2003-2005, when copies of the album were available for purchase.
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:9SO … =firefox-a
In 2007, due to requests from a growing fanbase, the band repressed ‘Did You Know People Can Fly?’ for those people who missed out during 2003-2005, when copies of the album were available for purchase.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaddisfly
Given what we do on this site, we often run into “under-the-radar†technical/specialist vocabulary that doesn’t seem to have made its way yet into dictionaries or online glossaries – e. g., “ongrowing farms†in aquaculture. I’ve often wondered whether people here would have any interest in a thread specializing in such terms. Anyone else feel that would be a useful idea?
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Such a thread is a good idea, and although the very act of creating it might make likely candidates suddenly evaporate, at least we’d have somewhere to corral them when they reappear.
fwiw ‘ongrowing’ might be influenced by the horticultural term ‘growing on’ which describes the stages following germination.
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Good eggcorn, and nicely documented.
There are already a number of web sites that track sublexical words and phrases. One I enjoy reading is Wordspy (http://www.wordspy.com/index.asp)
Last edited by kem (2009-03-15 15:31:49)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I like Wordspy, too, and it, Double-tongued Dictionary and Wordlustitude are all fun places to track neologisms. But of those, I think only DTD comes close to logging the sorts of things I mean (i.e., the kind of rare but well-established professional jargon that hasn’t made it into dictionaries). For instance, “ongrowing” in the technical sense occurs on none of those sites—and I didn’t find a gloss of it anywhere else, either (though since a # of the relevant google hits are password-protected, I admittedly didn’t do a thorough search).
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