sarcastic » sartastic

Classification: English – questionable

Spotted in the wild:

  • Is “very very similar” intended to be sartastic, or did you actually change something? (link)
  • I may get sartastic at time, but when I start doing somthing real faux pas just slap me, O.K.? (link)

The first, recent (usenet) example was my first sighting of this error. The second (usenet) example is the earliest I’ve found, dated 1996. It’s quite rare, and hardly seen outside forums.

| link | entered by dadge, 2005/03/07 |

Commentaries

  1. 1

    Commentary by ajo , 2005/03/08 at 5:30 am

    “Sartastic” is not an English word. Given that the “T” and
    “C” keys are close to each other on QWERTY keyboards, I
    don’t see how this could be other than a simple misspelling.
    It might be unintentional; or it might be that the user
    simply can’t spell. But an eggcorn it is not; there’s no
    “etymology” behind it. Might as well say that “optoin”, as
    in “we have two optoins to choose from here”, is an eggcorn
    — it gets way more hits on Google!

  2. 2

    Commentary by Adrian , 2005/03/08 at 1:42 pm

    These are not typos. “Sarvastic” is a typo. I’m quite confident that the people who write “sartastic” also say “sartastic”. My guess is that they model it on “fantastic”.

  3. 3

    Commentary by Ben Zimmer , 2005/03/08 at 8:05 pm

    Interesting— I can see how there may be some influence from _-tastic_, which has become a bound morpheme along the lines of _-tacular_, _-rific_, and _-licious_. In a post to the American Dialect Society listserv, I noted that there have been blends using _-tastic_ since at least the 1939 appearance of _fun-tastic_. There was a proliferation of such forms in 1960s advertising (_shoe-tastic_, _carpet-tastic_, etc.).

    On the other hand, this could simply be a case of “anticipatory” or “regressive” assimilation in the typing of the word, with the “t” of the final syllable being anticipated a syllable too early.

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