« previous page
next page »

last ditch » last stitch

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Nomar Garciaparra went 3-for-3 with one run scored and an RBI and Troy O’Leary grounded out in the bottom of the ninth to score Garciaparra in a last stitch effort for the Red Sox. (link)
  • This is not only emotional for my 2 daughters 18 and 22, but a last stitch effort to clear their skin. (link)
  • During the critique of this painting, the class saw the image with only one leg. Ironically, Imbeau’s friend had her leg amputated in a last stitch effort to save her life. (link)
  • [Hurricane] Frances made her last stitch attempt to assert her power on Monday by striking Florida’s Panhandle claiming 10 lives and causing $10 billion in damage. (The Daily Vidette, September 9, 2004)

Analyzed or reported by:

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/10 |

underlying » underlining

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Valence Bond Theory was developed by Linus Pauling and others in the late 1930’s to explain bonding and molecular geometry with one underlining theory. (link)
  • Will the video be entirely composed of live footage or will there also be an underlining story to it as well? (link)
  • Their moral code is strict and the underlining principle of hacking at the premier institute is “If you have to hack, hack by all means but help others.'’ (link)
  • There is an underlining story of three African American women (girlfriends) supporting each other as they strive together to fight against the odds. (link)
  • “If it’s not an e-mail from someone you know, be careful,” Brinn said. “That’s the underlining principle in which we all operate around here.” (The Daily Reflector, January 30, 2005)

Analyzed or reported by:

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/10 |

barbed wire » bobwire

Classification: English – final d/t-deletion – /r/-dropping

Spotted in the wild:

  • A dandelion
    stretches in the warm sunlight
    by the bobwire fence (link)
  • Dorothy Zinke Roberts as a little girl would walk over the fields with her brothers and sisters to go to school. On the way, they had to crawl under a bobwire fence and Dorothy would purposely tear any dress she didn’t like on that bobwire fence so as not to have to wear it again. (link)
  • Here I go again with the dang flagging of the bobwire. (We have to have bobwire because of the cows). (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

The author of the poem cited above explains:

> […] all I ever heard growing up was “bobwire”. I’m sure that’s hillbilly talk and it’s the only word I knew for barbed wire until I was grown [… ]

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/10 |

granted » granite

Chiefly in:   take for granite

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • One of the things many movie people take for granite is catering. (link)
  • Make a list of your blessings. Think this one through. What you take for granite is many times a blessing. Any day above ground is a GREAT day. (link)
  • There’s no way I can take this anymore. I put myself out there and let everyone have a piece of me. I’m finally just not going to let people take advantage of me and take me for granite anymore. (link)
  • My son has been to other clinics, but none has been so beneficial. You focus on skills, not scrimaging. I also liked the attention to detail. Nothing was taken for granite. Well worth the time, money, and travel. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

Things taken for granite are hewn in stone.

The phonetics of this substitution are explained by Mark Liberman:

> You might think that the sound correspondence “granted” = “granite” is only approximate, but at least for some English speakers it can be exact.
>
>There are two independent steps. The first and commoner one is for /’VntV/ (i.e. /nt/ when preceded by a stressed vowel and followed by an unstressed one) to weaken to [n]. A common example is the pronunciation of twenty as if it were spelled “twenny”, or center as if it were spelled “senner”. This sort of thing is often deprecated as sloppy speaking, but in fact most Americans do it all the time. I certainly do. If you can find an American speaker who never reduces /nt/ to [n] in such words, you’ve either found an extraordinarily fussy speaker, or one of the few Americans speaking a dialect that weakens /t/ in a different way in these contexts, e.g. to something like [ts].
>
>The other step in making granted sound exactly the same as granite is to devoice the final /d/.

| 4 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/10 |

scare » square

Chiefly in:   square quotes

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • The only way to “win” this war is to depopulate entire cities. I put square quotes around the word “win”, because even if the tactic works, I don’t see what it will gain us in the long run. (link)
  • For all intents and purposes, we will call these people terrorists. Why? Because they are. No square quotes. Just the word. Terrorists. (link)
  • There are packs upon packs of militants or insurgents or freedom fighters, as those who love the square quotes call them. (link)
  • Why do I have a burden of evidence when it’s sufficient for you to just make ironic references to mafia films or drop words into square quotes? (link)
  • Brian Leiter (who is responsible, indirectly, for the square quotes around the word “analytic,” by the way) wonders what philosophers think about this. Read the whole post, and let him know in a comment. (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

Even though the semantics of _square quotes_ may be somewhat obscure, the eggcorn is fairly well-attested. Maybe that’s because _scare quotes_ aren’t particularly frightening. And a connotation of _fair and square_ might come into it as well.

Real square quotation marks actually exist in East Asian languages. Wikipedia tells us:

>The Japanese and Chinese languages use square quote marks, because they are well-suited to languages that can be written in both vertical and horizontal orientations and can be easily distinguished from Chinese characters. Double quotes are used to mark quote-within-quote segments. English-style double quotes are also used for Chinese, but only rarely in Japanese due to the possibility of confusion with the dakuten sign: especially when handwritten, “か” ka might be incorrectly interpreted as が ga, but 「か」 is unambiguous.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2005/02/10 |
« previous page
next page »