Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The computer on the Enterprise created an illusionary world, by creating false perceptions in the occupants of the “holodeck”, an otherwise empty room on the ship – a hollow deck.
Train simulator
This development marks the beginning of practical use of the hollow deck concept, the room with perpendicular grids – so prominent in the Star Trek Universe, creating a tangible reality from illusion – that became the basis of some of the best episodes
Star Trek 2009: why it sucked
Scotty goes to the hollow deck and recreates the bridge of the original enterprise.
Sci fi musings
The very last episode of Enterprise was a complete disappointment with the implication the entire series was a “hollow deck” program.
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The Star Track series has given English a number of new words. Some of them are eminently eggcornable. Besides “hollowdeck†we have set fazers to stun, the Vulcan mind melt, and the ever-patient await team.
Resistance is futile.
Last edited by kem (2010-03-30 23:05:52)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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The fazer is so appropriate that you have to wonder whether there was not some strong flavour of the word in the original choice of phaser. They wouldn’t have had to specify the energy setting for a fazer – it just fazes.
Loved the “await team”!
Let’s see, the roundtripper faze->phase is venerable; it was the fifth entry on this forum. And resurfaced in 2008 as unfazed->unphased, where klakritz wrote:
One writes, ‘It’s just a phase he’s going through,’ to excuse uncharacteristically bad behavior, so someone ‘unphased’ would be keeping steady. (I wondered whether some meaning might be leaking through from the Star Trek universe, where the ‘phaser’ is the weapon of choice, but saw no evidence of this.)
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I should know what the acorn for “await team†is, but I don’t. (I’ve read quite a bit of scifi, but never seen more than an episode or two of all the Star Treks. I know, weird.)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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The acorn of “await team” is “away team”, as in, the group of people that they beam out from the space ship to explore a planet or visit another ship. I suppose the eggcorn is that the people back on the original ship “await” the team’s return.
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Star Trek has given to English an unusually large number of words. The most fecund period for science fiction contributions to English, however, was the era of SF pulp, the 1930s through the 1950s. As this chart shows, Star Trek words entered English in a time when the SF window was beginning to close.
The chart, by the way, is from a fascinating OED project to document the words that SF has added to English. I grok it.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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