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beck » back

Chiefly in:   back and call

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • Now you can rest assured knowing that the most knowledgeable and experienced programmers are at your back end call all day, every day! 24h support from our “graveyard programmers World’s best programmers at your back and call! (link)
  • The privileges and comfort, money can buy, are yours at your back and call. (link)
  • I am told that if you do not have goons at your back and call, you simply cannot operate in the political field. (link)
  • I mean, you can’t honestly expect me to wait at your back and call for you to make yourself available, whenever that might be. (link)

David Storrs in #catalyst chatroom on irc.perl.org reported the usage of “at your back end call”. In response to the text David gave (the first portion of the first reference in “spotted in the wild”), HCoyote offered their analysis:
“No, they’re at your back…they’re about to bend you over and fuck you with sandy lube.”
I think another possibility is due to the terms of computer programming. Front end and back end are used to describe different aspects of a program, e.g., Swing (Java GUI) programming. As noticed in the first “spotted in the wild” entry, both “back end call” and “back and call” are used. Since “at his|her|my|their|your|its back end call” only has 25 ghits, all of which appear to be from web hosting companies, I think “back end call” is more of a pun for geeks, me being one.

However, the second spelling “back and call”, seems to be an eggcorn, and still fits the analysis by HCoyote. In gentler words, and in a different sense entirely, it could also come from the meaning of the sentence “I got your back.” The last reference under “spotted in the wild” especially seems to support this sense. Google returned 342 hits for “at his|her|my|their|your|its back and call”, compared to the approximately 82,800 hits for “at his|her|my|their|your|its beck and call”.

See also: beckon call, beckoned call, beacon call.

| Comments Off link | entered by David Romano, 2005/08/12 |

expletive » explicative

Chiefly in:   explicative deleted

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “By [explicative deleted] god, look at the story we did about the former Beverly student … If that’s not [explicative deleted] controversy, then what the …” (link)
  • “They called me names like (explicative deleted) Indian and told me to go … I immediately yelled at them (Indians) to get the (explicative deleted) out of …” (link)
  • “Explicative deleted, explicative deleted. It was a word that rhymes with spit. We’re not certain where he picked it up, but no matter, the interview was …” (link)
  • “Instead of responding acidly to what I consider stupid posts I will instead close the door to my room and shout explicatives until my lungs are empty,…” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Wilson Gray (American Dialect Society mailing list, 10 August 2005)

Gray’s original contribution was an unattributed: “He was shouting, ‘Eff you!’ and other explicatives.”

On 10 August 2005, ca. 1,190 raw Google webhits for “explicative deleted” (as against ca. 63,700 for “expletive deleted”), but the “explicative” figure is high enough to make this look eggcornish. I’m guessing that the sound-symbolic value of “plic” (suggesting “pluck”, “prick”, “flick”, “frick”, “fuck”, etc.) plays an important role in the reshaping. Meanwhile, Peter McGraw suggested on ADS-L, 11 August 2005, that “another example of a shouted explicative would be, ‘”Shut up,” he explained.’”

“Expletive” >> “explicative” occurs in other contexts as well — as the object of “shout”, for instance: 4 hits for “shout explicatives” (vs. ca. 650 for “shout expletives”), 2 for “shouts explicatives” (vs. ca. 114), 3 for “shouted explicatives” (vs. ca. 817), and 18 for “shouting expletives” (vs. ca. 539).

From Ben Zimmer on ADS-L, 10 August 2005: “And there are 216 hits for ‘exploitive deleted’. Some of these could be spellchecker artifacts (possibly ‘correcting’ the spelling of ‘explitive’).”

[And now, from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky on 28 August 2007, an example involving neither deleting nor shouting, from a blog:

Of course they asked me this while I was simultaneously rolling out a pizza crust, emptying the dishwasher, bathing a child and talking on the phone to a stupid telemarketer who only understood the word “no” when accompanied by explicatives.]

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/08/11 |

boot(-)strap » boots-trap

Classification: English – resyllabification

Spotted in the wild:

  • Germans have the strength and the will to pull themselves out of a crisis by their own boots-traps, if only they believe themselves capable of doing so. (Address by German President Roman Herzog, Apr. 26, 1997)
  • The information for notification group defines the set of objects to generate SNMPv2-Trap-PDU’s. The well-known traps group defines the set of well-known boots-traps. (Raj Jain, "Network Monitoring Fundamentals and Standards", Aug. 14, 1997)
  • One would run into a trapped, self-referential problem if the “test” result were scrutinized in the same way as normally done with an external measurement equipment where a prediction value is acquired to estimate the validity of the result. No wonder that algorithms of the iterated Bayesean type are called “boots-trapping methods” and associated with hermeneutics. (Hans H. Diebner, "Dasein's Edge on its Description", Nov. 21, 2004)
  • Quantified gene expression levels were subjected to several supervised and unsupervised bio-informatics analyses and boots-trapping procedures to determine differences or degree of similarity between matching pairs of one patient. (San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium Abstracts, Dec. 8, 2004)
  • After boots-trapping the start-up of the JXTA platform, for which there are two options, the GUI application will want to instantiate one instance of the net.jxta.instantp2p.PeerGroupManager class. (JXTA Demonstration GUI)

Some examples make an explicit link to “traps” or “trapping.” Appears to be a common reinterpretation among German writers using technical English.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Ben Zimmer, 2005/08/11 |

tact » tack

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion

Spotted in the wild:

  • She has NO TACK. Seriously. She makes fun of her kids when they are going through puberty. (link)
  • I went and confused Seamus and myself. I don’t know how Fred does that so well. Oh well, he has no tack. Anyways, I found out who Seamus fancies I think. (link)
  • That said, if you do it and you get far enough, it couldn’t hurt your career! Just bear in mind that although Simon Cowell is brutally blunt sometimes… he is generally right. He just has no tack or manners! (link)

Using Google, “he|she has no tack” had only 46 ghits, while “he|she has no tact” only has 592 g ghits. I don’t see tact to be a common word to begin with, so that may be why there aren’t a lot of hits. Paul Pellerito made mention of “in tack” for “intact” in a commentary on this, and Brittany Hopkins mentioned “in tact” for “intact” in another commentary. I think that both suggest the confusion of “tack” with “tact”, as well as the usage of “tact” by itself. There’s also an entry on this site for the related eggcorn, “tack >> tact”.

| 1 comment | link | entered by David Romano, 2005/08/11 |

tract » track

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion

Spotted in the wild:

  • Historic farms were self contained and self supporting consisting of different tracks of land. (link)
  • Moreover, there are huge tracks of idle land in the country that is owned by individuals who inherited them from their predecessors. The unfortunate thing about these tracks of land is that they have been fenced off making it impossible for anyone to utilise them – in any case the lawyers would advise the owners not to let others use the land and to avoid the passing of ownership by adverse possession, etc. (link)
  • Environmentalists also demand that vast tracks of land be put into wilderness areas without roads and prohibit vehicles of any sort. (link)
| 2 comments | link | entered by David Romano, 2005/08/11 |
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