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granted » granite

Chiefly in:   take for granite

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • One of the things many movie people take for granite is catering. (link)
  • Make a list of your blessings. Think this one through. What you take for granite is many times a blessing. Any day above ground is a GREAT day. (link)
  • There’s no way I can take this anymore. I put myself out there and let everyone have a piece of me. I’m finally just not going to let people take advantage of me and take me for granite anymore. (link)
  • My son has been to other clinics, but none has been so beneficial. You focus on skills, not scrimaging. I also liked the attention to detail. Nothing was taken for granite. Well worth the time, money, and travel. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

Things taken for granite are hewn in stone.

The phonetics of this substitution are explained by Mark Liberman:

> You might think that the sound correspondence “granted” = “granite” is only approximate, but at least for some English speakers it can be exact.
>
>There are two independent steps. The first and commoner one is for /’VntV/ (i.e. /nt/ when preceded by a stressed vowel and followed by an unstressed one) to weaken to [n]. A common example is the pronunciation of twenty as if it were spelled “twenny”, or center as if it were spelled “senner”. This sort of thing is often deprecated as sloppy speaking, but in fact most Americans do it all the time. I certainly do. If you can find an American speaker who never reduces /nt/ to [n] in such words, you’ve either found an extraordinarily fussy speaker, or one of the few Americans speaking a dialect that weakens /t/ in a different way in these contexts, e.g. to something like [ts].
>
>The other step in making granted sound exactly the same as granite is to devoice the final /d/.

| 4 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/10 |

scare » square

Chiefly in:   square quotes

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • The only way to “win” this war is to depopulate entire cities. I put square quotes around the word “win”, because even if the tactic works, I don’t see what it will gain us in the long run. (link)
  • For all intents and purposes, we will call these people terrorists. Why? Because they are. No square quotes. Just the word. Terrorists. (link)
  • There are packs upon packs of militants or insurgents or freedom fighters, as those who love the square quotes call them. (link)
  • Why do I have a burden of evidence when it’s sufficient for you to just make ironic references to mafia films or drop words into square quotes? (link)
  • Brian Leiter (who is responsible, indirectly, for the square quotes around the word “analytic,” by the way) wonders what philosophers think about this. Read the whole post, and let him know in a comment. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

Even though the semantics of _square quotes_ may be somewhat obscure, the eggcorn is fairly well-attested. Maybe that’s because _scare quotes_ aren’t particularly frightening. And a connotation of _fair and square_ might come into it as well.

Real square quotation marks actually exist in East Asian languages. Wikipedia tells us:

>The Japanese and Chinese languages use square quote marks, because they are well-suited to languages that can be written in both vertical and horizontal orientations and can be easily distinguished from Chinese characters. Double quotes are used to mark quote-within-quote segments. English-style double quotes are also used for Chinese, but only rarely in Japanese due to the possibility of confusion with the dakuten sign: especially when handwritten, “か” ka might be incorrectly interpreted as が ga, but 「か」 is unambiguous.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/10 |

bass » base

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “At last!” replies a hoarse, base voice. “Is Fuchs with you?” (link)
  • In the Bayreuth Festival the 1978 edition Matti Salminen performed as Daland in Der fliegende Holländer and year after year he performed as Landgrave in Tannhäuser, as Titurel in Parsifal, as King Marke in Tristan and Isolde and also in some other base parts in the Ring-cycle. Matti Salminen’s repertoire includes the main parts for an authentic base voice in the works belonging to Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Glinka and Mussorgsky. (link)
  • Each individual voice has an inherent range and pitch. At a young age this pitch is usually high even for a person with a base voice. (link)
  • There are various kinds of voices. Yours seems to be a base voice. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/10 |

flair » flare

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Are you customer driven and revenue focused? Are you a negotiator with a flare for persuasion? (link)
  • For one IPFW grad, a flare for the theater led to award-winning costume design (link)
  • Feeney, who has served one term in Congress, representing a district east of Orlando, has a reputation as a devout neoconservative with a flare for using hot-button issues to his advantage. (New Times)
  • Smith always had a flare for the dramatic, and his announcement proved to be no different. (The Docket, February 8, 2005)
  • Within a few moments, Stone, the star of such top-grossing films as “Basic Instinct,” had shown how fame and a flare for drama could inject a passionate message into a complex debate. (International Herald Tribune, January 29, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/10 |

gold » goal

Chiefly in:   goal standard

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion

Spotted in the wild:

  • Intuitively moral conduct is based on the assumption that the consequences of all actions must be taken in consideration. “An act is morally just when it leads to the best consequences compared to other acts (van Willigenburg, 1993, p. 28). This is a consequentionalist norm. This raises the question what should be the goal standard to all conduct. (link)
  • We have argued with the NIH that our cell lines, because we’ve worked with them so long and have characterized them so much, should be the goal standard against which other lines are compared to evaluate whether they’re useful or not, and NIH hasn’t quite agreed to that, but they have asked us to put on a week long wet lab exercise when the funding finally begins to teach the NIH researchers what we’ve learned, what I’ve shared with you today, and how to handle these cells, and we’re very happy to go and do that. (link)
  • ‘Platinum’ would become the goal standard for dealer participation in co-op’s programs (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

The “individual reanalysis” nature of this eggcorn is blurred by the expression _goal standard_ having gained a foothold in bureaucratic speech, in the sense of “the standard against which the attainment of a goal is measured”.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/10 |
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