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haphazard » half-hazard

Variant(s):  half-hazardly

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Officially, the Chavez government is accusing some of the oil companies of half-hazard drilling practices in an effort to reap fast profits and Chavez has also suggested suing the companies for causing damage to oil fields. (Bay News 9, May 31, 2007)
  • Choosing the fish was a bit half-hazard, as I found myself on the spot at the fish market without any premeditated decisions to guide me. (personal cooking blog, February 18, 2007)
  • Although abstractions, his work is not simply a half-hazard throwing together of material in the hope that it will make you ‘feel’ something. (topix.net, book review, March 20, 2007)
  • Next came the open armoire, shirts hanging half-hazardly off hangers, looking every moment as though they would fall to the armoire’s floor, which was already covered with thrown shoes and previously fallen clothing. (Harry Potter fanfiction story, on Livejournal, April 29, 2007)

Analyzed or reported by:

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2007/06/04 |

colors (colours) » collars

Chiefly in:   with flying collars

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • She has passed the frisking with flying collars. (Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, Bantam Spectra, NY, 1993 (13th printing), p. 280)
  • Promising local skater Amritansh Sachdeva and Baibhav Nagaich lived upto the expectation of the selectors and returned home with flying collars winning gold in their respective age group in the recently concluded International Roller Skating Championship held at Dhaka (Bangladesh) from April 14-17, organised by Roller Skating Federation. (Central Chronicle, April 22, 2006)
  • Hey Rua thanks for the msg, I am so glad you finished your finals with flying collars, but then I was not that worried, some one as passionate and dedicated as you would not settle for anything but the best. (myspace.com, comment, 25 Feb 2007)
  • Anyways, she passed the California Bar with flying collars and now can be called Attorney at Law (I even changed her name in my cell phone appropiately). (personal blog, May 22, 2006)

Analyzed or reported by:

Michael Quinion writes in his World Wide Words newsletter:

> Neal Stephenson’s SF novel Snow Crash includes the line, “She has passed the frisking with flying collars.” This was surely a mistake, but it’s a surprisingly common one, with dozens of examples to be found online. The image is delightful, but it’s sad that so many people seem not to have heard of “flying colours”, because they don’t associate “colours” with the bravely fluttering flags of a military force. To finish a battle with your colours still flying implies that your force has survived intact.

_With flying collars_, on the other hand, goes rather well with the vigorous vitality of the triumphant roller skaters. The connotations aren’t that far apart, come to think of it.

Many thanks to wiredfool, who was kind enough to look up the Neal Stephenson cite for me.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2007/06/04 |

dissonance » dissidence

Chiefly in:   cognitive dissidence

Classification: Uncategorized – English

Spotted in the wild:

  • they call that (in political terms) ‘cognitive dissidence’, it’s a dichotomy (usually affecting Idealists) between the ideal world and the cold stark dark reality… (link)
  • There’s kind of a cognitive dissidence in this country about business. (link)
  • cognitive dissidence – we disregard information that conflicts with our previously held ideas (link)

Many of the Google hits for the phrase are in the context of politics or religion, where the word ‘dissidence’ occurs frequently. Also, as in the third example, it may be used as a person’s rejection of old or new conflicting ideas — thus, dissidence to avoid dissonance.

| Comments Off link | entered by Sravana Reddy, 2007/06/04 |

disillusioned » dissolutioned

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • A dissolutioned travel writer seeks to prove that the Aurora Islands disappeared from the South Atlantic. (Amazon.com, from a user-contributed list)
  • I was a bit dissolutioned with playing in England anyway, but I didn’t really know how dissolutioned I was until I came out here. (BBC Radio 1, interview with DJ Derek Dahlarge)
  • Gregory Hines is superlative as the dissolutioned American tap-dancer. Isabella Rossolini is charming as his Russian wife. (Amazon.co.uk, user-contributed DVD review)
  • I became very dissolutioned with sites like Myspace because,as social networking tools they’re only based on “virtual” interaction rather than actual face to face meetings and friendships. (Meetup.com, forum contribution, Sep 6, 2005)

Here in eggcorn land, we tend to be hesitant about attaching the eggcorn label to substitutions between two Latinate, Greek-derived, or otherwise learned words. As in the famous alligator/allegory example, these often arise from a lack of familiarity with the meaning and origin of both words: most are malapropisms rather than eggcorns.

On the other hand, borrowings or neologisms of this type are so common that English speakers do indeed have an intuition of the meaning of constituents like _dis_ or _solution_. This is why _dissolution_, evoking a sense close to “falling apart”, makes sense if you haven’t noticed the _illusion_ part of _disillusioned_.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2007/06/03 |
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