Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The plates we eat off of are smooth, shiny, and hairless. 1000+ ghits:
...Do you wear that hat/bandana/whatever to hide your bald plate? RF: Yes. Thank you for making me feel self conscious.
www.theattractionforums.com/off-topic/2 … u-159.html
This page is about the remarkable feat of regain in 1991 of some hair on a barren, hereditary bald plate, where nothing worked for hairloss or dandruff …
www.hairsaverplus.com/hairinvention.htm
McGee revealed that on their first date she had tried to ruffle Paul’s hair only for his obvious toupee to come off revealing his bald plate …
uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Paul_Daniels
I to am unsure of rogain or minoxidil , I have noticed that hair is growing in the middle of my head and some light hair on my Bald Plate…
hair-restoration-info.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/3466060861/m/1371049202
Part of this was Terry’s receding hairline and Dad’s bald plate. He often was mistaken for Terry while Terry was in school and he took great delight in it.
www.osualum.com/s/359/index.aspx?sid=359&gid=1&pgid=363
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A bowl would make even more sense (it’s a gourd in Nahuatl), but plate works. Agreed, nice find.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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While we’ve got Ken and Joe together in a post about a good eggcorn, I’d like to remind them of a couple of earlier statements they made. In 2005 Ken wrote
I’d like to join Pat in congratulating Chris et.al. on reaching the milestone of eggcorn #500. The next 500 may be more difficult, since we’ve already gathered the low-hanging fruit ....
In Feb of 2007 Joe wrote
Lately it’s been difficult to come up with anything entirely original for the database since all the low-hanging fruit seems to have been taken.
Like the two of you, there have been times when I thought that winter had arrived and eggcorn production would be tailing off. Then, all of a sudden, we get another crop of good eggcorns, ones that seem to be in the category of “low-hanging fruit.” Is it possible that the English tree is dropping eggcorns faster than we can collect them?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Kem, thanks for reminding me about that extremely foolish prediction. It puts me in league with the mid-twentieth century industrialist who firmly asserted that the world would never need more than seven or eight digital computers!
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I’ve been in the eggcorn trenches for most of four years now, and I remain pretty optimistic. Yes, it’s harder than it used to be. But the Web is also getting bigger every second—just moments ago, someone somewhere typed the first example of a reshaping that will be spreading on discussion forums in the next year, and our job is to find it.
My eggcorn “to do” list has about twenty items on it right now. Some of them will probably never be posted, some of them burred will beat me to, and at least two of them will probably show up on the forum this week. They may not end up on any best-of lists, but they’ll add to that massive pile we’re building every day. And by this weekend I will have thought of one or two others that will slot into the “to do” list—I never seem to be able to get it below about 20. No inn in sight, as far as I’m concerned.
There’s a very good reason why there may be fewer truly outstanding eggcorns this year than last. In Fall of 2008, spammers got pretty darn good at exploiting the auto-registration software on sites like this one. As a result, Chris now (reasonably) allows registration only “by hand,” and the necessity of emailing her to register has very obviously cut down on the number of new members. And that means, unfortunately, that we lose the benefit of all those spontaneous “one-offs” by people who register, post one excellent eggcorn, and then are never heard from again. A number of my favorite eggcorns (like Kohath’s “dayview”) are by people with only one or two posts.
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Dunno, Joe. With “bald plate,” “vagabound” and “slay one’s thirst” appearing in the last two days, it’s hard to complain. One day the well may run dry, but right now the flow looks strong.
Pat: The one-off contributors raise the quality a bit, but they don’t add much to quantity of the corpus. In the list of eggcorn candidates that I drew up at the end of 2008 (http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=3466), only 13% were proposed by contributors with fewer than 10 posts. Perhaps 80% of the eggcorns came from the Eggcornistas. You alone provided almost 20% of the yearly total.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Perhaps when we do our “best of” lists at year end we should recognize the lowest hanging fruit picked that year. We could call it the Under Our Noses Award, or SNOT (Seen but Not Observed Term).
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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