interim » in-term

Variant(s):  in term

Classification: English – cross-language

Spotted in the wild:

  • It seems that Kenneth McKay does not think that we have to do an in-term report. (Scottish Parliament, Local Government Committee, 28 February 2000)
  • Grants received last year - progress report due 2/1, Grants received two years ago - in term report due 3/1,Grants received three years ago - final report due 4/1 (link)
  • Even if you were to (by some stroke of genius) able to release an in term report before the next election, it could be shelved as un-official and so still money well spent. (C-ByteDirect)
  • Onsite, managed teams set up and run Web Server systems on an in term basis while staff are recruited, or for longer periods. (link)

I have frequently heard this in spoken use (as in “we have to submit an in-term report after 6 months and a final report at the end of the project”), but was never quite sure if this was just a mispronunciation. However, a Google search turned up 105 examples of “in-term report”, showing that at least some people believe this is the correct spelling. There were 4,460,000 hits for “interim report”. The eggcorn version does make intuitive sense - it sounds like a report that one writes within the term of a project, as opposed to a final report that you write when the project is finished. The actual derivation is of course from Latin, “ad interim” = “in the mean time”.

_[Edited and posted, CW, 2005/11/14.]_

| 1 comment | link | entered by alecmcclay, 2005/11/14 |

all fours » our fours

Classification: English – vocalized /l/

Spotted in the wild:

  • We fell a hundred times before we learned how to walk. If we had become impatient and given up, we would be crawling on our fours even today! (link)
  • In the entire three days we needed to get to the summit, we crawled on our fours, over snow and ice slopes between 65 and 70 degrees steep. (link)
  • we walked and we moved on our…on our fours (knees and hands) until we found a…a space in the center of the deck (link)

Two remarks. (1) I have categorized this, quite hesitantly, as “vocalized /l/”; I invite correction or amplification on this point. (2) Somewhat unusually for this database (as far as I know–again, I invite correction), the third of these cited occurrences–”we walked and we moved on our…on our fours (knees and hands)”–is from transcribed speech, namely, an oral history “made by Robert Shuster and Steve Gertz and … completed in November 1993″ (Shuster was and is the archivist of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, Illinois, USA); the notes before the transcription make it clear that the “…” represents the speaker pausing, and that the gloss “(knees and hands)” was the speaker’s, not the transcribers’.

| Comments Off link | entered by Lee Rudolph, 2005/11/13 |