Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I found a comment about comedian Jon Stewart interviewing (and harshly criticizing) business television personality Jim Cramer in which it was stated that Stewart “went for the juggler.” Since one of Stewart’s core complaints was that Cramer treats business news as a game, I think the commenter has reinterpreted the phrase to be an insult in which the target is a sort of clown. Here’s where I spotted it, and here are 5000+ Google results for the same or similar phrasing.
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It’s a fun one.
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Usage determines meaning, much more effectively than definition or purposefully imposed limitation does.
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I’m coming to think that my descriptive (not prescriptive) definitions of eggcorn need to change, given a lot of usage (like this post) where single-word substitutions are posited as eggcorns: “An eggcorn is a malapropism that (sometimes) makes senseâ€.
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Though, maybe, this should be listed as go for the juggler < go for the jugular . But there are plenty of juggler < jugular hits that don’t have the context of going for it: “juggler vein/vain” for instance. I don’t get the notion of clownishness there easily. If someone uses go for the juggler as standard, and if that same person thinks the target is a clown, and (less importantly) if that person doesn’t spell the “juggler vein†as such, this would be an eggcorn in what to me would be the more normal sense.
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btw, pdxuser, welcome, and don’t be discouraged if we start arguing over your find. It’s a good blooper—and it helps us with figuring out how to define eggcornishness even if we don’t want to immediately accept it into the category.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-03-14 22:38:58)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Seems to me more like a malaprop. But alternate meanings can lurk in the most surprising places.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I agree with David completely. This would be an eggcorn only in the phrase “go for the juggler” and only if the target is thought of as a clown.
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Just ran across this one again; got the image of barrelling into the juggler in mid-act and all the balls/bowling pins/plates/what-have-you come crashing to the ground. Fits pretty well for an eggcorny meaning.
*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 came across ‘jungular’ recently, and this looks like the best spot for it. A jug seems a container more suited to water or milk (jugs being in addition a slang term for breasts) than for blood. Wine, beer and, of course, punch fit in there nicely too but blood, I feel, seems more appropriately situated in the dark steaming greenery of a jungle.
The tiger squeezed its front leg through the opening and took a swipe at the lion, severing the animal’s jungular vein and leaving it dying in a …
Cooper has this sister, Maggie, who would just as soon as bite you at the jungular as talk to you.
At the end of the experiment, the rabbits were slaughtered by severing the jungular vein.
Only the French, German and Chinese revolutions went for the jungular of the ruling elites.
As I said yesterday, the trumpeter will not wilt no matter who attacks he will go for the jungular!
An highly unlikely but strangely compelling alternative could be the notion of Jungians discouraging the Freudular – go for the Jungular!
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