Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Heard this one this morning (from a native speaker of American English), then checked for it on the Internet and there seem to be lots:
all those sky-rises they were building
some water, a hill and skyrises. ... some water, a hill and skyrises by Jeff.Levingston.. [Pic of skyscrapers]
Picture of Singapore Skyrises, City, Singapore – [ Traducir esta página ] Picture of Singapore Skyrises, taken 2006-06-07 in City, Singapore
skyrises and highscrapers. I am super lucky to live in Chicago. I love the city. I love the noise and the rush and the tall buildings.
That last example is pretty clearly conscious wordplay, of course.
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The converse occurs plenty of times too.
Panoramio – Photo of Singapore High Scrapers – [ Traducir esta página ] 9 Apr 2007 …Singapore High Scrapers.
From the one hand, Beijing is an ancient city but on the other hand, it looks like modern town with many high scrapers.
Amidst the reddish twilight and the high scrapers, I fidget with my lavish LC-A. I met my love through Lomography
This shows that you do not need real high scrapers to get a nice skyline. Nice looking town.
These are pretty clearly blends of sky-scraper with high-rise . They seem, at least at first glance, to occur predominantly or at least disproportionately, on sites based in the Orient where there may well be non-native speakers of English involved.
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For one of these to be a good eggcorn: (a) It must be standard for somebody: they must think of it as the standard usage. (b) A nice coherent image must be part of that standardness. This is readily available (I think) for skyrise (a building that rises up [in]to the sky); perhaps a bit less so for highscraper .
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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