Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I’ve discovered that he non-word ‘quitely’ is extraordinarily common- about 300,000 ghits.
(About 1/3 of these refer to a famous cartoonist named Frank Quitely.)
Of the rest, the majority seem to be ‘quietly’ misspelled. A few writers use it to mean ‘emphatically.’ In still other cases, it’s hard to say which meaning is being employed- possibly both.
I’d be curious to know if others think there’s an eggcorn here and if anyone has a theory about why the misspelling is so prevalent. Examples:
Sachin Tendulkar after his brilliant unbeaten 140 against Kenya at Bristol, has quitely moved into the top three position among batsmen in the World Cup.
www.rediff.com/worldcup99/stats/2505stat.htm – 93k – Cached – Similar pages – Remove result
She floats quitely across to her favorite spot, crawls quitely to shore, baits her hook with the fattest of worms and waits.
www.authorsden.com/visit/viewShortStory … 1&id=15386
Moderate Republicans are quitely (and sometimes not so quitely) dissapointed with the President.
atlblogs.com/moderaterepublican/archives/001527.html
I achieved this a while ago, and quitely rejoiced. Congrats!
www.antipixel.com/blog/archives/2002/11 … stone.html
I pronounce R quitely strongly in words like sort. So would Americans and Canadians.
forum.wordreference.com/archive/index.php?t-370.html
Seattle is quitely turning into a food town.
forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=11595&view=getlastpost – 154k –
What you say is quitely correct.
www.peak.ne.jp/xoops/md/xhnewbb/viewtop … orum=1&
...what I can tell you ia that around 100000 Jews died in the famine, so it seems quitely unlikely Jews were behind it.
www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=232022&page=5
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To the extent that it means “quietly but very definitely†and that users of it perceive in it quite as meaning “definitelyâ€, I think it qualifies as an eggcorn.
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On the other hand, there are entries for it in reputable dictionaries, most or all of which qualify it as obsolete. It may conceivably be a survival of such an old meaning.
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It is certainly much more numerous on the Internet now than in 2005, but that probably is just the Internet being bigger than it was then.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2021-07-26 15:43:02)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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