Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
I ran across the following in a picture caption in a published article:
An attendee wears a rainbow donkey on their lainard on the fourth and last day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, on August 22, 2024.
I took “lainard” to be a sound-metathesis of “lanyard” but was bothered enough by the y-i switch to check whether there was a word “laniard”. To my surprise, both “lanyard” and “laniard” are accepted some dictionaries, though some consider “laniard” to be archaic.
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OK, I learned something new.
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Etymology sites (I’d link but don’t remember how) say the word came from French “laniere” which morphed into “lanyer”, which in the 17th century turned into “lanyard” ‘due to association with “yard”’ .
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Sounds like an eggcorn to me. An eggcorn that took over to become standard, not?
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=3475
records the eggcorn spurt of the moment.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2025-02-08 09:34:56)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I, for one, have never heard a “yard” in “lanyard.” But perhaps I should have—almost every English word terminating in ”-yard” does derive from “yard.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I’ve been waiting for the penny to drop but it’s descending very slowly, if at all. Unlike Kem, all I hear is yard, and in Guide to Standard Lanyard Size I find, “The most common lanyard size is 36 inches long and 5/8ths of an inch thick”.
A quick dabble on eBay reveals many 93cm and 27cm examples, representing lan-yard and lan-half-yard lanyards. Am I moving in the right direction, David?
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You arrived already.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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