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One does run across them in one’s reading. I’m particularly fond of phonetic near-misses.
For a while, I was adding new-found specimens to the collection in item #4, “Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language,” in Slushkiller’s list of reasons for rejection: hare’s breath escape, plaintiff melody, causal/casual, clamoured to his feet, a shutter went through her body, his body went ridged, empirical storm troopers, ex-patriot Englishmen, et cetera; but there came to be too many of them, so now I just keep a list:
I’m loathed to do it
spurn him to greater effort
have the since to come in out of the rain
steak tar-tar
passed history not with standing
kids-our-us
the illusive details
malice of forethought
pre-imminent expert
he was the hunter, and she his query
he was too forgone to hear him
fox paws
And, from the comment thread:
What puzzles me is how many of the words and phrases are uncommon in spoken English, and thus were probably picked up from reading, where the readers would have seen the correct forms. I can only hypothesize that their ears remember better than their eyes do.it’s a doggy-dog world (Maud)
their cloaks bellowed behind them (Renee)
for all intensive purposes (Tara)
Wallah! (TexAnne)
Viola! (TexAnne)
reign in one’s enthusiasm (Lizzy Lynn)
treat this client with kit gloves (Paula Helm Murray)
baited breath (Chryss)
pealing paint (Dirty Davey)
on the lamb (Deborah Roggie)
speak my peace (ksgreer)
she balled her eyes out (Mris)
the succession to the thrown (Pedantic Peasant)
two sense worth (Lloyd Burchill)
Earth fell under the alien yolk (Lisa Goldstein)
he had the patients of an angle (Lisa Goldstein)
the point is mute (Mike Jones)
to wreck havoc (Renee)
would that be exceptable? (Janet Croft)
a Flamingo dress, as worn by a Flamingo dancer (Linda Fox)
what the hay (Renee)
to hit the hey (Renee)
he brooched the subject (Emma)
she wore his broach proudly (Emma)
yay, verily (Owlmirror)
I’m siked about that test (Owlmirror)
he poured over the textbooks for hours (Robert Legault)
just desserts (Scraps)
he put his hands around her waste (Mrs. TD)
Post-Dramatic Stress Disorder (Ariella)
that medieval system of government … called Futilism (Ariella)
rabid typist (Harry Connolly)
Democracy has been running rapid in the Middle East (Fragano Ledgister)
low and behold (Writerious)
she galloped passed (Writerious)
nauseous/nauseated (Writerious)
it peaked/peeked his curiosity (Writerious)
they stood in a cue (Writerious)
“Bare with me,” said the stripper. (Writerious)
they excepted his application (Writerious)
he makes boo-koo bucks (Writerious)
I’ll have it for you toot sweet (Writerious)
don’t rein in my parade (Xopher)
this has lead to … (Xopher)
forward (as in part of a book’s frontmatter) (Kate Nepveu)
misquote spray* (Ann Rose)
broad soldiers (Ann Rose)
peachy king (Ann Rose)
the automobile’s breaks (—E)
taught muscles (Aquila)
writhing under his administrations (Myles Corcoran)
faze/phase (Jen Roth)
wreckless driving (Jen Wroth)
serendipitous/surreptitious (Miriam Beetle)
in intimate danger (Miriam Beetle)
Cleopatra memorised the Roman men (Candle)
Pompey and Crassus sited their views in public (Candle)
the first Roman sea exhibition outside the Mediterranean (Candle)
Suetonius’ Life of the Defiled Julius (Candle)
compose/comprise (Mike Ford)
he gave her organism after organism (galley slave)
Why are you her? (Vicki)
stay within earshout (Melissa Mead)
enormity/enormousness (Scraps)
fortuitous/fortunate (Scraps)
composer/compositor (TNH)
marquis candidate (Julia, quoting TBogg)
the human gnome project (ley)
straight-laced (The Grauniad)
the literary cannon (Aquila)
hair-brained (mk)
struck a cord (mk)
the judicial and penile system (Tom Recht)
cup of chino (Steve Taylor)
Straights of Hormuz (John M. Ford)
straight-jacket (John M. Ford)
Tor Nay Does (John M. Ford)
Surtsey was formed by undersea fishers (Sharon Mock)
Don’t tell Jane—shed freak. (Renee)
hammy downs (Kate)
back round (Kate)
poke-a-dotted (Kate)
prime Madonna (Kate)
one nation in a dirigible (Serge)
conscious/conscience (TNH)
dually elected (Candle)
the underlining principles (Dana)
quaffed hair (A. J. Luxton)
since time in memorial (Michael Croft)
they think they’re such a laugh ride (Kip W.)
rain of terror (Zingerella)
self-depreciating (TNH)
prehensile tissue (referring to nipples) (Sarah S)
climatic battle (NelC)
flaunted/flouted (Lori Coulson)
vice grips (Claire)
enclosed is a synapse plus three chapters… (BetsyB)
beckon call (pb)
they went out shooting peasants* (Xopher)
gantlet/gauntlet (Ledasmom)
cavalry/Calvary (Ledasmom)
discreet/discrete (Jerry Kindall)
founder/flounder (Marilee)
a right of passage (Clark E Myers)
extracting vengeance on him (TNH)
he gave a look of otter confusion (miwahni)
the body cannot with stain, what the mind does not understand (Fragano Ledgister)
take stalk of (Sara)
sewing her wild oats (Lisa Goldstein)
dragging his heals like a child (Sharon Mock)
teachers, formally enthusiastic about their subject… (Dave Luckett)
rod iron (Ulrika)
in tact (Ulrika)
last vestibules of fun and merriment (Fragano Ledgister)
it is a tenant among evangelical Christians (David Goldfarb)
Symphony in A Flat (Jasper Milvain)
gradually the spirit solidified into corporal form (Eleanor)
I had the bad luck to see this autrocity (TNH)
our hospital was in the mist of a project (Bill Burns)
a fine tooth-comb (Ajay)
mid-evil style jewelry (Maximus)
music played on queue (Maximus)
I can’t be asked to do that (UK) (Eleanor)
low-and-behold (Mary Aileen Buss)
rot iron (Glen Fisher)
thirty yacht six (Greg London)
he couldn’t believe how well she was fairing (TNH)
she was fiberglasted (Suzanne)
it doesn’t pass mustard (L.B. Lidsky)
taking the United States as a hole (Eric Nelson)
she was still milling over it (TNH)
wholistic approach (Susan)
on tenderhooks (abi)
a whole nother thing (Xopher)
I was apart of the group (rm)
the Klux Klutz Klan (rm)
pneumonic/pneumatic device (i.e., an aid to memory) (rm)
a grizzly crime (Cassandra)
it exuberates the problem (Steve Taylor)
boil a cup of rice and through in some saffron (jennie)
“I don’t like it a bit,” he grossed. (TNH)
how do we diffuse the bomb? (TNH)
stars in the fundament of our genre (Dave Langford)
it played on my mind (TNH)
democracy is running rabid in the Middle East (0qwerty0)
died-in-the-wool (yucca)
photogenic memory (avva)
he washed the ruminants of sorrow from her face (TNH)
the experience had wizened him to the ways of the world (TNH)
he was sword to protect them (A. J. Luxton)
a bellweather borough (Fragano Ledgister)
seeing her naked was a peek experience (nalo)
she’s a teatotaller (nalo)
bubble bees are not aerodynamically equipped to fly (elise)
don’t scratch it, you’ll only excoriate the problem (Joanne)
your gentile organs (elise)
pornographic memory (P J Evans)
moral/morale (P J Evans)
knit one, pearl two (Melissa Mead)
wring the changes (Lisa Goldstein)
scolding hot water (Xopher)
bearfooted Carmelites (pip)
biopsy/biography (Karen Funk Blocher)
public sediments on the issue (Xopher)
a regiment of diet and exercise (Lisa Goldstein)
people had to live on their own reconnaissance (Fragano Ledgister)
the voting ballads where unreliable and contained falsies (Fragano Ledgister)
hand’s on training (rm)
safe confinds (rm)
randomality (rm)
fender binders (rm)
a three-foot ring tale diamondback rattlesnake (P J Evans)
Seattle Odyssey is an incredulous journey… (TNH)
the Dodge of Venice (TNH)
the Republicans are a shoe-in (thank you, Raw Data)
farbeit for me to refuse… (TNH)
cast a pallor over the occasion (TNH)
malice of forethought (Dave Langford)
his necktie was slightly eschew (TNH)
muttering explicatives under his breath (TNH)
descention in the ranks (TNH)
they put out a want for his arrest (TNH)
with all the strappings of state (TNH)
surviving the eminent holocaust (dagny)
do un to others as you would have them do un to you (David King)
KU Med. Center Defends Its Brain-Dead Tests (Paula Helm Murray)
declare it a federal disaster (Fragano Ledgister)
embroidered in battle (Jing Mei)
he slashed cream across her new dress (Jing Mei)
the girl’s new outfit was electrical (Jing Mei)
he wants to ring the author’s neck (Deborah Roggie)
it’s like an Alcatraz around my neck (Scraps)
he is not aloud to say a word (Xopher)
an outer body experience (Xopher)
“succame”, past tense of “succumb” (Erik Nelson)
annunciating each word clearly (TNH)
the total annihilation of all assistance (TNH)
snuff said (Alex Halavais)
the gapping whole their departure left (TNH)
piss pour timing (TNH)
he was weekend by the loss of blood (TNH)
psycho tropical drugs (TNH)
cow towing to the powers that be (TNH)
root tail quartz (also: retaliated quartz)(TNH)
they chorused their ascent to the question (TNH)
he took a skewered view of things (TNH)
The Magesterian gives the Pope teaching authority. (TNH)
in a fracture of a second; he leaned forward a fracture of an inch (TNH)
if he ever wizened up to what you’ve been doing (TNH)
nothing in this world is real; it’s just an illustration (TNH)
the surgery was much more evasive than I expected (TNH)
at a more desecrate distance, he followed her in (TNH)
how dare they try and sensor him? (TNH)
face-to-face with the nozzle of a gun (TNH)
a none disclosure agreement (TNH)
looking a bit worse for the wearer (TNH)
standing in the face in danger (TNH)
the two of you have been playing at a crossroads (TNH)
apples to apples, dust to dust (TNH)
we could just let the robots fight the war on our behalves (TNH)
loud scream of furry (TNH)
He’s diluted if he thinks that! (TNH)
That jives with most of the commentary I’ve heard. (TNH)
quote un quote (Kyle Armbruster)
I don’t want to sound like a no-it-all, but … (TNH)
trying to illicit sympathy (TNH)
that’s mox nix (Om)
I’d dishone you (TNH)
the project whithered on the vine (TNH)
it’s just here-say (TNH)
This specimen was deposited by glaziers on the Holderness Coast. (TNH)
It is easy to caste dispersion on the FDA (TNH)
Jane Fonda: “All tolled, abstinence-only education has failed miserably.” (TNH)
I know saludvictorians in my class who cheated their way to the top. (TNH)
She lay unconscience on the floor. (TNH)
They were in the throngs of an argument. (TNH)
Addenda: Michael gives us “Similar-Sounding Cousins: A Comedy of Manors”
Earnest is an ex-patriot Englishman, escaping from his sorted passed in New York. Jack is his wealthy American cousin (a reel blew bloodied type, to the manner borne). When Earnest looses his job righting insincere rejection letters for TOR Books, he moves in with Jack in his stately sub urban home.Hijinks insue.
We had practically simultaneous posts from Sarah Sabine, Naomi Parkhurst, and Grant Barret, explaining that over at Language Log these are known as “eggcorns,” and that there’s a database devoted to them. I recommend it. A sampling:
trite and true, ad homonym, eurologist, scarlet teenager (a bird), lazy fare, lack toast and intolerant, from the gecko, go at it hammer and thongs, pigment of the imagination, Cadillac converter, bumpetta-bumpetta, outer body experience, whoa is me, pre-madonna, Southern brawl, fair to midland, don’t know buttkiss, a posable thumb, she got her ten-year at the university, in lame man’s terms, eggtopic pregnancy, come to not, pigment of the imagination, get one’s gander up, like a bowl in a china shop, at lagerheads, Hobbesian choice, put the cat before the horse, cut to the cheese, cyberstocking, pier-to-pier network, post-pardon depression, nip in the butt, by enlarge, and what in the sand hill were you thinking?
Finally, GLD gave us an unnerving specimen collected in the wild (i.e., a church bulletin):
[A]s the priest preyed over the elements on the alter, they were altared into the real presents of the devine.
Addendum: The reason the main list ends with a long string of examples credited to me is that I’ve continued to add new specimens I’ve collected in the wild. —TNH, March 07
Or it could just be homonym replacement when typing. I know I'm very prone to it.
he was the hunter, and she his query
ROTFLMAO!
This gives a whole new imagery to query letters.
Woot!
One of my former law school professors recalled a student handing in an essay test answer that included the line, "It's a Doggy-Dog world."
The professor didn't count this observation against the student, though. "After all," she said, "it *is* a Doggy-Dog world."
Then she sighed and took another sip of her drink.
From one of my fellow members of the local writing group:
"Their cloaks bellowed behind them."
Given a strong enough wind, that might happen....
At the top of my list is the ever-popular:
"for all intensive purposes"
"Wallah!" in tones of triumph. Or "Viola," ditto. This led to my current favorite, "VYE-OH-LAH!" But she'd just finished her first sock, so I forgave her.
I suspect that many of these are caused by spell-checkers-gone-horribly-wrong.
The phrase which always makes me wince is "very unique".
(Which I realise is not a phonetic near-miss; I just had to vent.)
One I have started to see more often: "reign" for "rein", as in "reign in one's enthusiasm." (I never see "rain" in the same spot, however. Interesting.)
These kinds of phrases are a huge source of amusement to the linguistics & language blogging communities. They're usually called "eggcorns" - a common near-miss for "acorn". There's now a database with a short history included. Endless linguisticky fun!
Actually, I kind of like the sound of "empirical storm troopers." We could use some butt-kicking fact-checkers like them if we ever hope to expand the borders of the reality-based community.
I suspect some of these (passed history not with standing, the illusive details) fall into the category of what the folks over at Language Log call "eggcorns". You might enjoy the Eggcorn Database.
Sorry! Forgot to check if someone else had posted the same thing while I was typing mine up.
Some of these qualify as eggcorns. That database is a think of beauty.
(spelling intended!)
Can I put in a vote for "forward," used as a heading for the bit in the front of a book? Published books, by major presses?
Gah.
"Who told you you're allowed to rein in my parade?"
This actually led to a pretty good pun when Diana Ross's concert in Central Park was rained out. She told everybody she was going to have to stop, and to please leave the park in an orderly fashion, but she kept singing while they did. Getting soaked the while. The Post, which I normally hate, headlined the story as "Diana Rains Supreme." Now that's just brilliant.
I'm driven crazy by the little common ones, like "This has lead to..."
I so want someone to write me a story titled:
"he was the hunter, and she his query"
It makes me giggle every time I read it.
JK
When I just started out, I made few of those typoes. The more I write, the more frequently I see them.
My most common is inserting "eyes" instead of "eye". I honestly cannot get rid of it. At least I'm not the only one - for awhile there the misspelling of idiot as didot was so common, didot actually became a slang word among OWW writers :)
When I started where I work now, they had advice to "treat this client with kit gloves..." ARGH. It was even put into our project outlines.
And the Kansas City Star can be counted on to use the wrong homonym almost every time they use one. (hair, hare, heir; there, their; etc.). When she retired, my mother-in-law, took it upon herself to write correction letters to them. Good hobby, it isn't helping.
One can never have too much support for Language Log or the Eggcorn Database! I think my favorite eggcorns are the ones that, to modern speakers, make *more* sense than the originals. While mistakes like these can be annoying, some of them make me marvel at the flexibility of our language. For example, "deep-seeded" for "deep-seated":
And in terms of the current ordinary-language meaning of the words involved, “deep-seeded ignorance” makes sense, while “deep-seated ignorance” doesn’t. Ignorance can be planted deep and thus have deep metaphorical roots, but deep-seated ignorance would have to be ignorance cut with a lot of room in the crotch, or maybe ignorance sitting in a badly-designed armchair. - Mark Liberman, of Language Log
Add 'tow the line' to the list (unless someone's pulling the rope around).
Oh, I pulled one of these my first year in college. My sin? "Baited breath."
When the mistake was pointed out to me, I wanted to die. Fortunately I got over it enough to laugh hysterically.
Oh, I could give you a whole lot more:
She galloped passed his manor.
The arrival of a somnambulist peaked/peeked his curiosity.
The mummies stood in a cue.
"Bare with me," said the stripper.
"I should of brought my trebuchet," Melvin said.
"I should never have excepted his application as viceroy," Bitsy mused.
And not that I expect everyone to spell perfectly in French, but:
Vlad makes boo-koo bucks.
I'll fetch your arsenic toot-sweet.
I also get testy about the confusion between affect and effect (since I teach science, this comes up a lot), or the misuse of nauseous (which means "to induce nausea") and nauseated. So if you say, "I'm nauseous," (meaning "I induce nausea") expect me to give you a funny look and to slowly back away.
More good 'uns on my site here:
Self Editing
Oh, and we must not forget the ever-popular, "low and behold."
"Copywritten." Although, for some reason, I hardly ever see "copywrite."
I suspect this will happen moor and moor off in as speech recognition softwear seize wider usage.
James wrote: I suspect that many of these are caused by spell-checkers-gone-horribly-wrong.
Reminds me the time I wrote a response to a yearly review and my spell-checker asked about my manager's name whether it should be replaced by valuator or violator.
Oh, I don't know, Tim. There are people who write copy. Aren't they copywriters? And isn't their finished product copywritten when they're done? I mean, like, "I have that ad all designed and copywritten; now we just need the artwork."
Yes, I'm kidding.
Writerious, I'm pretty sure the boat has sailed on 'nauseous', much as I sympathize.
Chryss, I learned that one before I learned what the expression meant. I had a joke book containing the line "the cat ate cheese and waited beside the mousehole with baited breath." By the time I figured out why that was funny, I was pretty much vaccinated against that particular error.
plaintiff melody
This sounds like something from Trial by Jury.
Reading the paper last week I saw a bit about the "pealing paint" in downtown Chapel Hill.
Fragano - Or a leitmotif from any civil-law movie.
My favorite was on the evening news. The story was about a prison escape, and the graphic over the newscaster's shoulder showed bars and the phrase, "ON THE LAMB."
I kid you not.
The following come from student essays:
It is incontinent to vote.
Love is something everyone indores.
The ration desires for knowledge and national eros.
Democracy has been running rapid in the Middle East over the past fifty years.
African Americans fall at the button of this category too.
Everyone won’t to live comfortable.
plaintiff melody - a musical by Busby Berkley...
Xopher: You're right.
Dirty Davey: The editor should have had his neck (w)rung.
I still find myself typing speak my peace, despite having been corrected many times now that it's piece.
Then again, I have family in Mississippi; no matter how much I get told otherwise, my fingers automatically type it mischevious — because there IS an extra vowel in there if you were raised on the Gulf Coast. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
The one that makes me shriek is when people proclaim that they balled their eyes out. That's not an image I wanted, whether it's with a melon-baller or in a more off-color sense. "My grandfather died, and I balled my eyes out." Well, we each deal with grief in personal ways, I suppose....
Similar-Sounding Cousins: A Comedy of Manors
Earnest is an ex-patriot Englishman, escaping from his sorted passed in New York. Jack is his wealthy American cousin (a reel blew bloodied type, to the manner bourne). When Earnest looses his job righting insincere rejection letters for TOR Books, he moves in with Jack in his stately sub urban home.
Hijinks insue.
I teach senior English in High School, the usual BritLit assortment, but with a focus on tying it all together with the history and sociology of the time. While it is shocking the number of these "near-misses" that show up, I'm convinced that, as James D. Macdonald mentioned at the beginning, these are spell-check related.
Unfortunately, I feel it's not "gone wrong" but "gone away". The prevailing attitude among my students (especially coming in) is that it doesn't matter, 'cause spell check fixes everything. So none of them even try to remember.
What I have found particularly horrifying in papers all through this year is the substitution of "thrown" for "throne". As in, "Hamlet reflects the uncertainty about the succession to the thrown." Or "The Victorian era is named after Queen Victoria, who sat on the thrown throughout this period."
These give a whole new perspective to the old "I trust him about as far as I can throw him", but are not words I'd have expected 'easily confused'.
I'll just add my two sense worth.
Frequent reader, new poster here... and I can't quite belive I'm piping up to disagree with JMD and other honored regulars here, but I just don't see how these can be spellcheck mistakes. If you choose the wrong homonym, it's still a valid word... thrown/throne, shuttered/shuddered, etc. The ony way the spellchecker can be blamed is if the author had a near-miss typo for the wrong word in the first place. (The one exception is prostate/prostrate; the former is mysteriously absent from most software dictionaries.)
It's neat for me to see you professional writerly-type-people enjoying these eggcorns (and thanks! I hadn't known of that site either), because from my POV as a complete amateur, they're really wince-worthy. I read a lot of fanfiction (hey, it's free) and homonym abuse is everywhere, even in stories that are otherwise pretty good. I've tried puzzling out the reason, but I think Theresa has the likeliest idea... those of us who grew up with arual saturation from TV/radio just remember sounds with more clarity than words. I know I find that snippets of songs can bring up memories just as powerfully as certain smells.
'Eggcorns' is a new one on me.
Aren't these also malapropisms?
I see these while proofreading all the time. My favorite so far is "Earth fell under the alien yolk" -- well, no, not unless the aliens are birds, as I wrote in the margin. Second favorite -- "He had the patients of an angle" -- though this had to be the result of too much reliance on spellcheckers.
And what's with "because" spelled "becuase"? I've even encountered in professional publications! Why doesn't spell check pick up that one? Or does it and people override it?
(yes, pet peeve; for some reason it grates on my nerves!)
Spellcheck only knows if it's a real word. It can't tell which one was intended if there are multiple possibilities. If the user doesn't know which one is correct, they'll probably pick the first one (or the one they think is right), even if it turns out later to be wrong.
I still find myself typing speak my peace, despite having been corrected many times now that it's piece.
Well, this gets into another kind of confusion with English usage, but could that be influenced by the fact that you "hold your peace" when you've decided not to "speak your piece"?
The "reign" for "rein" one drives me up a tree.
Another one I see all the time that makes me want to kill things is "diety". As in, "Artemis is the diety of the hunt."
THAT'S NOT EVEN A WORD, GENIUS. *sporksporkspork*
First off, I love Making Light. Thank you!
This is from the U.K. Guardian paper this morning:
Imagine how many more copies Jane Eyre might have sold in its first run if Brontë's publishers had run a campaign featuring a smouldering Jane and Rochester and a burning Thornfield.
The Guardian, Monday 1st May
It's not really a dreadful phrase (homonym/spellcheck mistake) like the others posted, but I really liked the idea of Thornfield actually setting Jane and Rochester on fire.
One from spoken Engish that drives me up the wall is "the point is mute"; the CEO of a company I used to work for said that regularly. I don't think I've ever seen it in print, though.
I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned the ever-popular 'to wreck havok'.
Incidently, I blame this on people hearing the phrase, but not reading it often enough to get the correct spelling implanted in their memory. So, when they pop up with it, they pick the spelling they think is most right.
And ditto for the reign/rein transpositions. I still boggle whenever I see a phrase like 'He took the reigns of the situation'.
Harry -- yes, I remember a librarian who applied for a job with a line on his resume about his Lexus/Nexus skills. But he got the job anyway, which still rankles me.
Oh, and here's a new one I got in an email today -- from a grad student, no less:
"I'll try an see if I can start later. Would that be exceptable or not?"
And this is someone we are allowing to work as a teaching assistant? The mind reals!
I'm a Sims 2 Addict (not in recovery). Today I came on custom skin called a Flamingo Dress. As, it is further explained, worn by a Flamingo dancer.
And a couple more...
'What the hay' and 'to hit the hey'.
Okay, they're colloquial, but still.
Amusingly enough, "flamingo" and "flamenco" derive from the same source: the dazzling outfits worn by Flemish soldiers in Spain's armies.
Yeah, but they're completely different English words. The same can be said of 'rape' and 'rapture'—both come from a root meaning 'carry off'. I maintain, however, that I'm quite willing to drive a man to rapture, but not to rape!
Janet, apologies for my profession. Lexus-Nexus???? I presume some sort of law librarian?aaaieeeee!
And how about "broach" and "brooch"? I once had the un-luck to come across "he brooched the subject gingerly." AND "she wore his broach proudly." I know in technical terms "broach" is considered a variation of "brooch" but, since I had always encountered either as the verb or with the meaning "chisel" it gave me a bad feeling about her dress sense!
Spelling peeves: I've noticed that all too often, "yay" is used where "yea" ought to be. And speaking of not even being a word, "sike!" seems to be the common spelling of "psych!".
I was going to post about eggcorns, but I see that several zillion already have. So instead, I will point to the book of the Anguish Languish
I'm guilty of more of these than I'm willing to admit. Just last week, I was caught with "peak their interest." To say that I'm embarrassed by my spelling is an understatement. I keep a dictionary around and check it often. (I’m a big fan of dictionary.com.) In spite of that precaution, too many mistakes slip through.
I could blame a number of different bad influences, but I’ll just say it’s my fault now. I need to take responsibility and work to improve my writing.
This post is a good example of why I read this blog. I don’t feel as though I’m smart enough or experienced enough to be posting here, but I know that if I hang around I will learn something and, I hope, improve myself.
Teresa: This brings back those halcyon days (which I'm tempted to call Halcion days) when mystery novelist Nancy Atherton used to freelance for us and I'd get a call from the receptionist: "I have Nancy African on the line."
L. Pullers: Now that's a malapropism; some eggcorns would qualify, some would not. A lot are just mistakes involving homonyms. A malapropism involves a words that is similar in sound, but different, like "professional" and 'professorial."
Of course I see this sort of thing all day long, but I can't recall a lot of good ones right this minute. There are a bunch of homonyms such as leach/leech and sheer/shear that even good writers have trouble with.
Oh yeah--I do see:
He poured over the textbooks for hours.
all the time.
One of the most frequent mistakes: "just desserts".
From an short story read online:
"He put her hands around her waste."
Um, eww?
While marking this week's crop of exams I discovered that one student had written about World War One vets suffering from Post-Dramatic Stress Disorder.
A TA for a history course on Western Civilization found an even better one: "The medieval system of government was considered pointless and ineffective. That is why it was called futilism."
As I become tired, I become dangerously prone to homonym typos, and even more embarrassingly, near-but-not-quite homonyms. Such as transposing "are" for "hour" and other similar abuses. It is as though my hands are taking dictation from my brain, but after a certain point they cease paying attention to the context of what is being written, and instead type out rough approximations of what they think they heard my brain say. It is very odd - my brain very clearly knows which word I intend to use, but something gets very broken in the process of nervous system transliteration. I have to stop and look at my hands as though they are completely mad. I occasionally fear am suffering from some kind of a Strangelovian disorder and my hands are going to one day run away with my text altogether.
Emma-- Nope, just a garden-variety librarian. The other members of the search committee somehow didn't think it was too alarming that a librarian couldn't spell the name of a database he said he'd learned to use. Personally, I hold members of my notoriously nit-picky profession to pretty high standards and feel they have even less excuse than other people for typos on their resumes. And catalogers even more so!
I've heard somewhere - and I can't believe I don't have a link for it, but I'm firing up Google and trying to find the right search terms - that memory as it relates to spelling is more linked to sound than to sight. So I would say these have less to do with spellcheckers and more to do with hazy recall.
Here's a pet peeve I've nursed for years. In the 70s/80s CBC radio news announcers started pronouncing "junta" with a j as in James. I complained. They explained to me that this was a new corporate policy as Canadians weren't familiar with Spanish pronunciation and to say it correctly would be much too confusing for us to cope with.
I suppose it prevented spelling mistakes, but I still twitch when I think about it.
"I have Nancy African on the line."
Coulda been the spider calling.
This discussion *almost* makes me miss teaching undergraduates, from whom I received the following in essays:
misquote spray
broad soldiers
peachy king
The one mistake which most rankles me is defiantly/definitely. I would issue a blanket condemnation of the use of "definitely" as a wek intensifier at the start of every semester -- it never seemed to help.
enjay: As someone who speaks Spanish well, I'm not fond of that pronunciation either, but it is acceptable per Web. 11. I console myself with the thought that it did inspire the great song by the Monochrome Set, "The Jet-Set Junta."
I guess if these things are set to music, they become mondegreens.
I don't find myself accidentally typing homynyms, and I avoid spell checkers. But I do have one personal howler to relate.
It doesn't make any difference in spelling, but I took it for granted that the expression "the die is cast" referred to the process of making a mold.
In the Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce wrote that the die is not cast, it is cut. For some reason missing the context of "dice", I emphatically agreed. After all, a die is USED to cast, so I assumed the original expression about casting the die had been garbled somehow.
These things don't phase me at all -- I would of spelled them correctly, had I known.
:: aaarghghghhhahhh ::
Another thing that is disappearing fast is correctly formulating conditional tense -- if it were [to be].
Where I work, we are dealing with 'outsourced' copyediting, and whether it is an autochanger or a person, correct usage -- 'if it were [to be] found that ...' -- is invariably replaced with 'if it was found ...'.
A book crossed my disk recently wherein the author had persistently referenced the breaks on the protagonist's car. This would have been less annoying if the CE had actually corrected it.
I once was the third person in an email chain where the first person spelled it "chord" and the second person spelled it "cored." Unfortunately, the word they wanted was "cord."
"passed history not with standing"--perhaps he just got a C-minus?
A shutter went through my uncle's body once, but those are the hazards of tornado country.
Oh yes: At least one of these has more or less entered the language now: "butt naked."
Is there any psych research that could shed some light on Teresa's observation: "I can only hypothesize that their ears remember better than their eyes do"?
Because I just can't imagine making any of these mistakes. It's impossible - reading them makes my eyes hurt. Maybe that's just a matter of practice, for I've been a fanatical reader for many years. But I also wonder if it's because I don't hear words as I read them. They feel like abstract shapes to me. (I believe, from the sort of verbal slips I make, that words are filed in my head by approximate length, and by first letter - like a Scrabble dictionary. Unfortunately, even if this is true, it doesn't make me good at Scrabble, because I can't anagram worth a damn.)
If I want to hear words as I read them, I have to consciously turn the sound up in my mind. I used to avoid doing this, because the sound in my head slows me down. At some point I figured out that good writing gets a lot better if you listen to it in your head instead of just reading it, so now I read novels a bit more slowly - but with a lot more enjoyment.
I've also had to practice listening to my own writing as I type - that's a learned skill for me.
Does everyone read this way, or just some of us?
Oh, man. I really want some misquote spray.
From what I have seen of manuscripts in the past few years, one of the primary jobs of a proofreader is to wipe out the symptoms of what I call Homonym Disease.
So many writers choose the wrong read/red where/wear the other belongs. No doubt you have seen this epidemic yourself. It's one that spell checkers can't prevent.
Mike B: You may be treating written English as a heiroglyphic system (you remember the shapes of words, rather than merely their phonetic components). There is research to support this; it is one way of treating the most common form of dyslexia.
I do this myself. The wrong word is a physical wrench to the reading process. Certain common mistakes (teh for the, for instance) I've learned to gloss over, but most still make me wince.
I also tend to typo real words--thing for thin, for instance, or this for thin. Bah, humbug.
cmk:
I think the tendency to type 'speak my peace' is possibly influenced by the confluence of 'peace of mind' and 'give you a piece of my mind'. I've taken to using 'speak my peace' as a type of written pun that, if spoken, simply wouldn't register.
We watched shutter spread memetically through one fandom's fanfic, and then out into others. At one point it seemd like every second sex scene had someone shuttering. It was often associated with taught muscles.
I also like "writhing under his administrations".
You are nearly responsible for my wife choking to death, luckily jello isn't too good at blocking the airway. I suppose I have to share some of the blame for my part in relaying the bellowing cloaks line.
When I was a grader/TA/instructor, I counted off on papers if it was obvious that the student had not used a spell-checker. I also counted off when it was all too clear that the student had trusted the spell-checker implicitly.
murgatroyd: Worse, I've seen people actually correct "faze" to "phase" as in your first sentence.
On a local news broadcast, I once saw a graphic listing charges that had been brought against someone, including "wreckless driving".
spoken malapropisms are different, of course, but those are the ones that seem to grate on me worst.
i had a teacher in high school who always said "serendipitous" when he meant "surreptitious". & he said it more than you might imagine, too.
i was listening to a radio program about the state of mental health care in the us yesterday, & it would have been a very interesting program, except the speaker kept saying "intimate danger" when he meant "imminent danger." aaaargh. & this was a former writer for the new york times.
I learned from a non-Wiki reference source that Reggie White reeked havoc on the field.
During my university years, one prof specifically advised against trusting spellcheckers--he'd found a study where one group of students was given a page of text with twenty spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes and told to correct it, while another group was given the same page and allowed to use spellcheck to correct it.
The spellchecked version had half again as many mistakes in the final count, including some that were not in the original piece.
If I weren't at work, I'd google-fu a reference for this.
(guiltily ducks back under her rock)
No-one seems to have mentioned one of the ones that really annoys me. Somehow, in recent years, the practice has crept in of saying (and writing) e.g. "If I would have known that, I wouldn't have bought the squid." Isn't the correct form "If I had known that..."?
It is actually all too easy in a long spell-checking job to hit the wrong option and authorise a misspelling. I've done it, and I'm about the most pedantic speller I know, though less so about other solecisms.
Because I just can't imagine making any of these mistakes. It's impossible - reading them makes my eyes hurt. Maybe that's just a matter of practice, for I've been a fanatical reader for many years. But I also wonder if it's because I don't hear words as I read them.
I always hear words when I read them, but I'm still stunned by spelling mistakes like these. I think there must be an additional component in the filing system, though, because "rein" and "reign" definitely (indeed, defiantly) occupy different parts of my brain. I tend to think it is more of a meaning thing than a visual thing, because I don't think of myself as a visual person at all. That said, I always have trouble pronouncing a name or a new, complex word until I know how it is spelled; after that, I generally have little trouble. Beats me, then.
As for student essays, most of the ones I've kept have contained sentences amusing mostly for their bathos. But there were a few of these things too:
“[Caesar’s] invasion of England was looked upon in awe as it was the first Roman sea exhibition outside the Mediterranean…”
"Cleopatra ... memorised the Roman men."
"Both [Pompey and Crassus] sited their views in public..." and (from a different essay) "were dually elected".
And my favourite student citation, of Suetonius' Life of the Defiled Julius.
Those are all from the same set of exams last year.
Relly, some people spell visually, and others spell aurally. You can tell which way they spell by watching how their eyes move when they try to spell a difficult word.
People who spell visually are generally better spellers than people who spell aurally. "Sound it out," which is how I was taught spelling in grade school, is terrible advice for anyone who is trying to learn to spell English! Only when I discarded it did I become a good reader; and a good reader is (barring neurological problems I don't know about) a good speller.
The more times you see a word spelled correctly, and see the correct choice made between homophones, the more likely you are to get it right when you write...so I'd say "read, and having read, write right, and your paper will be read, but less red."
BTW I think children (as opposed to adolescents or young adults) should not be taught the word 'homonym' at all. Appallingly, it's used for both homophones AND homographs, which are entirely different things. This makes it virtually impossible to explain the situation of 'red', which is homophonous with 'read' (past), which is homographic with 'read' (present), which is homophonous with 'reed'.
Not that I believe in using 'homophone' and 'homograph' in grade or junior high school either. If your goal is to teach them Greek, sure. If your goal is to improve their spelling by getting a concept across, no. Call them 'sound-alike words' and 'look-alike words'.
Doesn't anyone have any damn SENSE any more?!?!?!
OK, end rant. This has driven me crazy for decades.
I'm surprised that many of these things *aren't* caught by software. Or, rather, that Google hasn't already invented the software that would catch them.
For instance: I doubt that the word "shuttering" occurs very often in the wild. If it turns up in a paragraph it's probably a typo. Or consider "excepted his application": surely it wouldn't take a very sophisticated computer program to know that "accepted" and "excepted" are phonetic cousins, and that "accepted his application" is a common phrase while "excepted his application" is rare.
Of course, once Google gets bored making real money and decides to invent this software, a lot of pro writers will probably turn it off, lest it surround every novel turn of phrase with a swarm of dialog boxes. Terry Pratchett wouldn't be able to see his own prose for all the underlining.
On the unintentional pun front, the next site I visited after Making Light just now had this in a record review:
the two sides often stay as distant as rival cliques at the high school reunion. Without a guiding principal, the dud tracks sound even weaker
I'm pretty sure that was unintentional, anyway.
On a local news broadcast, I once saw a graphic listing charges that had been brought against someone, including "wreckless driving".
I'd define 'wreckless driving' as 'driving without ever totalling a car'.
"Cleopatra ... memorised the Roman men."
Well...I'm sure she tried.
You may be treating written English as a heiroglyphic [sic*] system (you remember the shapes of words, rather than merely their phonetic components). There is research to support this; it is one way of treating the most common form of dyslexia.
Which is interesting, because within living memory that is how reading was taught in a great many American elementary schools -- the infamous "look-say" system, which was later denounced as the primary source of American illiteracy, phonics being touted as the Only True Way to do it. (The issue is anything but simple, and as you'd expect with something involving public ed, has political components, and I'm not trying to start a fight about it.)
Most of the examples I remember have already been cited, though not "comprise" for "compose." I would put "comprised of" in the same category as "I'm nauseous;" it's not usually an issue of the person mistaking one word for another ("compose" and "nauseated" are not particularly esoteric words) but of someone who assumes they are synonyms and is trying to sound elevated.
An invented one does come to mind,** though it's more of an in-joke, as I can't imagine the people who would use the phrase making this error:
"Speech is privilege."
You know, there's at least one F/SF story in that.
*Speaking of popular typos. . . .
**Come on, you knew I would do this.
I only have one, but it's a doozy:
"He gave her organism after organism."
To which I can only say that they should have been using protection.
One that threw me completely out of a story a while back: "Why are you her?"
After a moment I realized that, rather than suggesting one person turning into another, or in disguise, it was supposed to be "Why are you here?" But by then it was too late.
(I am also very tired of muscles being described as "taught"; even if spelled correctly, that's a cliche.)
I'm with Xopher on "wreckless driving." How can one not be for it?
I'm an auditory reader, and I make these kinds of mistakes because I spell by sound. A lot of them look like the sort of mistakes speech recognition software makes, too.
Re: when the "mistake" sounds more accurate than the real term-someone close to me says "stay within earshout."
Makes sense to me, since we don't have to fire a rifle 'cross the holler to get in touch with our neighbors.
i am a visual speller, i always have been. i have a primarily visual mind, perhaps linked to the fact that i am a visual artist.
so i've always been a very good speller. if i've seen a word a couple of times, i can usually spell it. i thought it was a silly skill to have past elementary school, what with spellcheckers.... but it does make one feel smart on the internet.
That said, I always have trouble pronouncing a name or a new, complex word until I know how it is spelled; after that, I generally have little trouble.
I can remember words once I've seen them written down, but I can't remember spoken words well. I have a friend who collects folk ballads, and she can learn lyrics by ear, which to me is an inexplicable magical skill. I can pick up tunes by ear, to some extent, but the words fall right out of my head. I have better luck if I translate the spoken words into typewritten text on an imaginary piece of paper in my head - but that's so slow and mentally taxing that I usually prefer just to forget.
A side effect of remembering words as they appear on a page: when I read a book, and then read a different edition of the same book, I am occasionally distracted because the line breaks have moved and now the book is different.
John Ford: I was taught phonics in first grade. Fortunately, although phonics seems to have made no impression on me whatsoever, my growth does not appear to have been stunted!
Galley Slave: *doubles over in hysterical laughter*
Janet: a CATALOGER made that mistake? And they hired him? Ouch.
Mike and John: it's nice to know that there's something real about visual language skills. I learned to read when very young and can, by now, manage several languages well and others not-so-well. I've noticed that even at the early learning stages, I visualize the words and will pick up on those that look "wrong". I've had teachers insist I couldn't possibly know from the shape of the word alone, but I do!
It's a problem when I am dealing with Romance languages, where there are close-enough words, and I have to remind myself which language I am using.
I make the distinctions between comprise/compose and nauseated/nauseous that Mike does, but mostly for pleasure in making the distinctions (and desire to not appear illiterate to pedants); Web 11 disputes the correctness of both distinctions.
Writerious,
A while back a friend of mine did some etymological research on the nauseated/nauseous thing and tells me that the two have swapped meaning several times over the years.
Enormity/enormousness is another one. And fortuitous/fortunate.
Mike B: "accepted his application" is a common phrase while "excepted his application" is rare
OTOH, applications and exceptions go hand in glove in my world - software.
Another thing that is disappearing fast is correctly formulating conditional tense -- if it were [to be].Where I work, we are dealing with 'outsourced' copyediting, and whether it is an autochanger or a person, correct usage -- 'if it were [to be] found that ...' -- is invariably replaced with 'if it was found ...'.
if clauses—the traditional rules. According to traditional rules, you use the subjunctive to describe an occurrence that you have presupposed to be contrary to fact: if I were ten years younger, if America were still a British Colony. The verb in the main clause of these sentences must then contain the verb would or (less frequently) should: If I were ten years younger, I would consider entering the marathon. If America were still a British colony, we would all be drinking tea in the afternoon. When the situation described by the if clause is not presupposed to be false, however, that clause must contain an indicative verb. The form of verb in the main clause will depend on your intended meaning: If Hamlet was really written by Marlowe, as many have argued, then we have underestimated Marlowe’s genius. If Kevin was out all day, then it makes sense that he couldn’t answer the phone.Remember, just because the modal verb would appears in the main clause, this doesn’t mean that the verb in the if clause must be in the subjunctive if the content of that clause is not presupposed to be false: If I was (not were) to accept their offer—which I’m still considering—I would have to start the new job on May 2. He would always call her from the office if he was (not were) going to be late for dinner.
murgatroyd opined:
Another thing that is disappearing fast is correctly formulating conditional tense -- if it were [to be]
English is losing syntax more basic than the conditional tense: Participles are vanishing. For instance: "carry handles", "shave cream", and "bake time". And, of course, "spell checkers".
Granted, English has a history of jettisoning the "complicated" parts, but it seems we're starting to lose some of the essential bits,
Granted, English has a history of jettisoning the "complicated" parts, but it seems we're starting to lose some of the essential bits,
N dbt vwls wll b nxt t g.
I don't recall when "was graduated from" completely disappeared, but it was a good while ago.
Owlmirror: Well, the shift toward text-messagese has already started.
73, JMF
found a really good one
By way of TBogg, Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist wants to be the "marquis candidate" for the Constitution Party.
Unless Tancredo runs, of course.
If we're getting into mangled spelling, a local chain of flower shops regularly advertises "bokays", at least on their store marquees.
Julia: If Gilchrist wants to be the 'marquis candidate' he may have to duke it out with Tancredo.
candle -- "Cleopatra ... memorised the Roman men."
The first semester I was a grader, one of the students wrote: "The head of Nefertiti has long been arousing to archaeologists and art historians." Fortunately this was not in the fall, when the first grading time tended to correspond all too closely with ArmadilloCon.
I'm with those who boggle at these mistakes, because they always instantly jump out at me. I don't know if I'm a visual speller or not, because the same applies to grammatical errors; an incorrect subject/verb agreement or a misplaced comma bugs me just as much, which doesn't seem to lend itself to a "shape of the word" style recognition.
Then again, I learned how to read and write the same way I learned to play the piano, which is to say I cheated. I figured both things out not by studying the rules, but by imitating what I heard or read repeatedly until they were ingrained and unbreakable sets of pattern recognition. Or something.
So, in the same way I barely remember how to read music, but can still play Mozart from muscle memory, I remember virtually nothing about the rules of phonics and grammar (subjunctive mood? Mine eyes glazeth over), yet very rarely seem to make mistakes in sentence structure.
Other than the unfortunate propensity for run-on sentences, of course.
Scraps: Yay subjunctive! It's perfectly clear to anyone who grew up using it, and was taught to use it by people who did so correctly. My mother says that if you don't have the subjunctive by the time you're five, you'll never really have it.
Murgatroyd, if by "outsourced copyediting" you mean using freelancers rather than in-house employees, I've been one of those freelancers, I've hired more of them than I can count, and they can be extraordinarily good. If yours aren't good, get better ones. They're out there.
One of the things we never did was accept offers from "copyediting firms" who proposed to have their (nameless) copyeditors work on our manuscripts. That never works. Quality control goes all to hell. As Martha Schwartz said, "If they're good enough to work on our books, they're good enough to take our copyediting test and work for us directly." Also: "We don't use anonymous copyeditors."
On general spelling theory: your real killer-bee mutant spellers remember spellings visually, and double-check them kinesthetically. Unread misspellings in their peripheral vision generate a Sense of Wrongness. Some of them report perceiving typos as literally sticking up above the surface of the page, or flashing, or being a different color from the rest of the text. On occasion they can spot typos that are going past faster than anyone can read, when they don't perceive themselves as reading the passing text. Some can orally spell out words at auctioneer speed -- see Detective DeLongpre (played by Lyle Lovett) spelling "Gudmundsdottir" in The Player. I can do it for whole phrases. Orally spelling antidisestablishmentarianism isn't harder than spelling townsfolk. It just takes longer.
I don't know how that kind of spelling ability correlates with being able to pun and rhyme. If it does, I suspect it's an inverse correlation. It took half an hour for "misquote spray" to decode for me, and I'm still stymied by "speech is privilege."
The only use I have for phonetic spelling is as a mnemonic device, and then only in a few cases, such as fuchsia: it's rude, but it works.
Language is in a constant state of flux, so a lot of usages that were once considered incorrect are now so thoroughly accepted that few people even are aware they were once considered substandard. Somwhere I have a grammar book from the 1930s decrying the use of "fix" to mean "to repair." I can't think of anyone who wouldn't use that word in that way now.
"Nauseous" to mean "experiencing feelings of nausea" hasn't advanced quite that far, but I think it's almost there. When I was a boy I was taught to say "nauseated" instead of "nauseous," and to reserve the latter to mean "inspiring nausea" ("A nauseous odor issued from the slaughterhouse.") Now, I know more than one person who says, "It made me nauseous," and I often don't bother to correct such usage when I'm editing fiction (depends on context).
Somehow in all this talk of eggcorns and malapropisms, I am also reminded of the list that Ellie Lang used to have of titles of books that customers had requested at some bookstore or other. I've forgotten a lot of them, but the two that stood out were those great classics of African American literature, Color Me Purple and The Autobiography of Malcolm the Tenth.
Robert: I remember Clan of the Care Bears and Women Who Love Men Who Hate Women Who Deserve It.
They're all of the "a moment's thought" variety (as in "a moment's thought would indicate that's wrong). Those are the mistakes which people really shouldn't make.
But I have to disagree slightly with Teresa - how common they are in spoken English depends who you're speaking with, I think. There aren't any on that list which I'd be particularly surprised to have come up in conversation with friends, in one way or another.
(But then, we have some strange conversations at times.)
learn something every day... I thought the proper term was "baited breath" (Oh, come on, like you always knew what all the proper phrases were...) and come to find out here that it's "bated breath" and "bate" is a contraction for "abated" and that the only place the contraction is used is in the phrase "bated breath".
I still can't get what "misquote spray" is supposed to be...
And then there's the ever-popular "hypocracy", evidently a form of government in which the populace are ruled by the lowest dregs of society. (Actually....)
Nobody's mentioned "poured over," but I ghost-wrote a "forward" to a book, so it's always something.
years ago, in a student's paper: an off-hand mention of the human gnome project...
Someone needs to sponsor a contest for a short story under 300 words with the most eggcorns possible that still manages to tell a story.
Mike B: you are not the only one to have to consciously turn up the sound in your head if you want to hear the text you're reading. This has been my lot for most of my life. Which is odd, because as far as anyone can guess, I learned to read from the phonics taught on "Sesame Street." Nobody's actually sure, since I was two or perhaps a little younger when I insisted that I didn't have to get down off the hood of my aunt's car because I was reading the inspection sticker, and, when challenged on this, rattled off "State of New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles."
The only times when I hear the words in my head rather than assimilating them soundlessly are when there's a strong regional idiom. I always heard the British accents in Douglas Adams.
Did this quirk give you the same trouble reading aloud as I had? I could never make my voice go as fast as the words were coming into my head.
"Misquote spray": I'm guessing that it's to kill those flying insects that suck blood and spread malaria: mis-quo-tes.
Ad homonym is the logical fallacy you get when you deride someone by punning on their name.
And a tenement of faith is an argument based on faulty premises.
Oh, crap. Mosquito spray.
I kept parsing variations of "misquoting" someone and assumed "spray" was wrong. wow.
this is definitely not my thing.
My favourite, back when I was a fledging teaching assistant, informed me that 'The Chilean Christian Democratic Party was originally called the Fraganistas.' I resisted, barely, the urge to write 'They have betrayed everything for which I ever stood.'
Some of those mistakes make very vivid images of a The Phantom Tollbooth variety. Except, instead of just playing with idiom, it's playing with butchered idiom. Sometimes Terry Pratchett goes for things like this, but he's also a (criminal) genius, so maybe that sort of work should be left in his culpable hands.
The Bellowing Cloak.
Yolk of Alien rulership.
Baited breath.
The pre-imminent experts.
Of course, "a doggy-dog world" is not a word selection mistake, it's a spelling mistake. "A Doggy-dogg world" was generated by rapper Snoop Doggy-dogg, intentionally.
TexAnne writes:
"Wallah!" in tones of triumph. Or "Viola," ditto. This led to my current favorite, "VYE-OH-LAH!" But she'd just finished her first sock, so I forgave her.
Long ago, in a Christmas card, someone wrote my parents in those tones of triumph, exclaiming "Viola! (as we say in Peoria.)" This amused my father inordinately.
Ever afterward, when a Higgins triumphed, or when a string quartet was spotted, the cry was heard.
"Viola (as we say in Peoria)!"
Today (or yesterday in fact) there was an article on this very subject in the Guardian:
If you believe the internet is the fount of all wisdom, giving free rein to bloggers to exercise their vocal cords, think again. Ancient English cliches and expressions are being mangled by the culture of cut and paste and the spread of unchecked writing on the internet.
According to the Oxford English Corpus, a database of a billion words, dozens of traditional phrases are now more commonly misspelled than rendered correctly in written English.
"Straight-laced" is used 66% of the time even though it should be written "strait-laced", according to lexicographers working for Oxford Dictionaries, who record the way English is spoken and written by monitoring books, television, radio and newspapers and, increasingly, websites and blogs.
"Just desserts" is used 58% of the time instead of the correct spelling, "just deserts" (desert is a variation of deserve), while 59% of all written examples of the phrase in the Corpus call it a "font of knowledge or wisdom" when it should be "fount".
It has become so widely used that the wrong version is now included in Oxford dictionaries alongside the right one.
"Just desserts" is used 58% of the time instead of the correct spelling, "just deserts" (desert is a variation of deserve), while 59% of all written examples of the phrase in the Corpus call it a "font of knowledge or wisdom" when it should be "fount".
Interestingly, both of these mistakes don't bother me the way a lot of the other ones do, because the words themselves still imply a meaningful symbol or metaphor, even if they're more... bizarre than their original forms. (Once upon time, religion and wisdom were nearby on semantic webs, and you don't get dessert until you've earned it.) Also, I didn't even know "Just deserts," which just goes to show you that the internet is a fount of information.
Similarly, "toe the line" v. "tow the line" both mean something even if they mean different things.
I thought 'Ad homonym' was the name for attacking tagging for having lexical ambiguity, when opposed to controlled vocabulary keyword assignment. Flickr disambiguates by co-occurrence of other words which is fun.
On the 'look-say' vs 'phonics' battle, both are wrong, in that they are based on flawed cognitive theory.
Look-say falsely applies an analogy to how oral language acquisition works, and on how mature readers see words as a whole, effectively requiring beginning readers to re-derive all orthography themselves.
Phonics teaches post-hoc spelling 'rules' as predicates, which is equally inappropriate for children, as resolving predicate logic is hard enough in math, let alone when misapplied to spelling.
What works is teaching phonological awareness - that sounds are primary, and letters are representations of them, and that there are multiple 'sound pictures' for each phoneme in english. Then resolving homophones can be done by memory.
As this fits well with how the brain represents language, it can be taught relatively rapidly (Rosie, my wife, gets children from stumbling incoherence to fluent reading in 12-16 1-hour sessions using this method, called Phono-Graphix).
Sesame Street is perniciously bad, as it teaches chanting letter names rather than sounds. Between the Lions is a lot better.
Xopher, don't you now that the paste tenth of "to copywrite" is "copywritted?"
This is be cause the product, off a copywriter's work is the copywrit.
You use a copywrit in caught too proof that the defendent has no write to copy your copy (the low says they must rite there one copy).
Any common one, courtesy of another thread: cannon for canon. Oddly fannon does not seem so common.
Wow! Thanks for citing the Eggcorn Database -- I'll update a few entries with your finds as soon as possible. (Oh, and I am an irregular but faithful reader...)
(My favorite entry on Ellie Lang's list was One Hundred Years of Solid Food.)
Teresa: You have "by enlarge" in your last ¶ twice.
--Your friendly neighborhood copy editor
I frequent a forum where I have to stop myself from replying to topics with "by the way...it's chord, not cord."
strike/struck a cord
hair-brained
The way I learned nauseous vs. nauseated was to remember the correct usage of poisonous vs. poisoned. If you'd swallowed a dose of strychnine, you wouldn't say, "I'm poisonous," but rather, "I've been poisoned." Hence "I'm nauseated" rather than "I'm nauseous." But I don't go around correcting people. I just mentally point and laugh at those who describe themselves as "nauseous." "Yes, by Jove, you are!"
And here's another choice gem from a student paper: "Animals often behave according to instinked..." (not a common misusage to be sure, but it made me laugh).
And oh, yes, MK, I can't tell you how many student papers I've read that talk about "vocal chords," "the spinal chord," and various other "chords" in the human body. At least in science they have some excuse, for having run across words like "chitin" (pronounced kite-in), they may get the impression that the "ch" is supposed to be there. Or perhaps it's a decorative feature, like the "e" that they persist in putting on the end of "tomato."
As a fresh T.A. (at an Ivy League school, too!) I see so many of these as to have become immune to all but the most flamboyant. E.g.:
"This paper will compare the judicial and penile system of post-apartheid South Africa with the judicial and penile system of the present-day United States, with reference to black men."
That one moment made several hours of grading worthwhile.
Putting my Shylurk mask back on-
Tom
Writerious, in science they may also have run into chordata, which may have persuaded them that other biological terms should have "ch" as well.
Seen on the menu board at a cheap cafe: "cup of chino"
Teresa: I want to paratypo that as "copyediting farms." (There surely must be an actual word* for Deliberate Misuse.)
And I've had too dire a day** to search the thread, but did we really miss that other minor classic of the form, "straight-jacket"? I don't remember actually seeing it, but surely there must be an instance of "Straights of Hormuz" out there. (Long ago, when the TV show being parodied was still on the air, Mad ran "The Straights of San Francisco, which was fairly inspired, by Mad standards.
I realize that Closed Captiousness is a different Department of this Office of the Inquisition, but earlier tonight the Weather Channel offered up Tor Nay Does. Doubtless these are a frequent excuse for Flatiron traffic accidents.
*Yes, I know. Let's Not Go There, though we're already in There's Central Business District.
**See previous footnote.
Thus far our gracious hostess: your real killer-bee mutant spellers remember spellings visually, and double-check them kinesthetically.
I'm one of these - on the rare occasions I hesitate over something, usually an ei/ie problem, writing both down solves it. Like you say, I spell out words at high speed - in fact, people usually have to ask me, say that again but slower? because it's easier for me that way. I don't have any conscious impression of visualizing it, but I think it must work this way - I'm reminded of Feynman's experiments with counting while distracted, and people who keep track of the count visually vs verbally (in Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, I think). Being able to manage with one input mode and one output mode seems to help streamline things a lot, compared to doing both through the same channel. I also can't learn a word until I know how it's spelt - it's just a noise for me until I relate it to written language, then it clicks into place.
Typo-spotting, yes... the sudden intrusion of something that's Not a Word into language stands out like, er, something that stands out a lot. I perceive that kinaesthetically, though, like a bump in the road, not visually.
I don't think there is a correlation between this and punning/rhyming - I'm fond of both, if not actually good at it. (I'm told the only way to be actually good at punning is to refrain. That one, of course, comes up depressingly frequently... by now, I'm well versed in it.)
".... as the priest preyed over the elements on the alter, they were altared into the real presents of the devine." (found in a church newsletter)
Spell checking is definitely visual for me - I can almost always picture the word on a page if I need to check a spelling that (well, yes) looks wrong to me.
I don't know if it makes any difference, but I process most things that way. I test die cut mechanicals in my head too (although mental origami is much harder to do under distracting conditions, since unlike the properly-spelled word, I've probably never seen the finished product)
Rikibeth: I think I've always been able to slow down well enough to read aloud without stumbling, although sometimes I have to concentrate to prevent my delivery from becoming breathlessly fast. When things are going well, I'm able to read a few words ahead of the spoken words in order to plan the phrasing a few milliseconds ahead of time. Unfortunately, when I read too quickly I also tend to skip small words, which can lead to verbal entanglements.
Teresa: "Kinesthetically" feels exactly right! When people ask me to spell a word, I am compelled to write it on a chalkboard (real or imaginary) and look at it until my stomach, or possibly the back of my neck, tells me whether the spelling is correct or not. Alas, I can't do this at warp speed, and the other superhero powers which you mention are also beyond me.
I would guess that the ability to see typos leaping out of the text, or turning colors, is a mixed blessing at best. To one with such a gift, surfing the Web must feel uncomfortably like being drunk.
"To one with such a gift, surfing the Web must feel uncomfortably like being drunk."
That doesn't describe my reaction, which is more of a mild revulsion or despair, coupled with an immediate feeling that the balance of the content is untrustworthy. "If the writer can't even spell..."
Pogo did a number on one of these with 'Viola Voila, Girl Insect'.
I spell words the way I ran into them - it's resulted in some British spellings that I can't shake. I hear the words when I'm thinking, but reading is more like watching movies or television: the whole sound-and-picture bit. Reading math and science texts is a lot quieter, but can be harder to understand.
Did you know that the island of Surtsey was formed by undersea fishers? It's true -- I heard it in an educational film. (Granted, I was in elementary school at the time, and hadn't come across fissure often enough to be familiar with it.)
... and the rein/reign thing is sneaky and evil even if you know better. Just sayin'.
Many of these could work in an SF story. "Taught muscles" obviously benefit from some sort of hi-tech direct reflex implantation. "Bated Breath" is a brand of pheremonal lozenge. And the "throws of ecstasy" (has that been mentioned yet?) is a zero-g sexual maneuver. The "plaintiff melody" reminds me of the musical court case in the comic Starstruck.
I'm confident (uh oh) that "vocal chords", in particular, is such an attractive error because string instruments, such as your vocal chords, produce chords.
John M. Ford -
Dire a day? He's Alan's cousin, isn't he? Part of the Marry Men? Works for Robbing Hood?
I might be wrong, of course.
Although to be fair "toot sweet" has been around since WWI (can't go 'round speaking foreign, can we?). It's part of that fine English tradition of nicking other people's vocab and mangling it beyond all recognition.
Close, but you're thinking of "Dire á Dale." He's with the Morose Men, a band* that roams through Sherwood Forest robbing from hedgehogs and giving to sheep. Well, that was the idea, anyway. But it goes a long way toward explaining the name.
*Drummer, bassist, lead guitar, and 2nd-level Bard.
I made the front page? EEP!
Another one from the local writer's group: "Don't tell Jane! Shed freak!"
This one annoyed a friend so much that she made a slew of LJ icons around it and passed them out hither and yon. If you see one ('Could it be... SHED FREAKS?') that's what the joke is.
Re: heiroglyphic/hieroglyphic: dagnabbit. Another one for the personal "Check this" list.
On look-say and phonics: I was taught both ways. It left me with superior reading skills, but no obvious superpowers--I don't spell like lightning, for instance.
I can, however, spot the one typo in a piece of someone else's prose, even if that prose has already had three other people spell and/or grammar check it. It's embarrassing.
Hello, Chris Waigl, you also need the complete list from item #4 in Slushkiller. Not all of them are eggcorns. Take your pick.
MikeB, I'm not one of the ones who gets gaudy typo alerts. For me, it's more like there's a sesame seed lying on the desk directly under the typo, so that when I mentally run my fingers over it, I can feel a bump. That's if I'm proofreading or otherwise doing close reading.
Surfing the web is more like crossing an unswept floor in a busy concourse: you can see that there's a lot of stuff scattered around underfoot, but you do your best not to look at it.
Sharon Mock wrote "Did you know that the island of Surtsey was formed by undersea fishers? It's true -- I heard it in an educational film. (Granted, I was in elementary school at the time, and hadn't come across fissure often enough to be familiar with it.)"
The glorious thing about this is that if you transpose the spellings in the other direction, one of Terry Gilliam's films is suddenly about Goatse. Everyone loves Goatse, don't they?
Oooh! I get a lot of these from my students. College students, mind you. My favorites so far:
hammy downs
back round
poke-a-dotted
prime Madonna
For some years, we had on our wall-of-fame a news item which referred to the "plaintiff noises" made by a fawn that had been hit by a car. A friend of ours suggested that the fawn was saying "I'll sue! I'll sue!"
"Irregardless of what one might think, the conclusion will be..."
Meaning that what one thinks WILL affect the conclusion?
ksgreer mentions the mangling of mischievous into mischevious... I've been told that the latter is how Mister Spock said it. So much for his mother having been a schoolteacher...
A few years ago, columnist Rob Morse at the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the Pledge of Allegiance and how, as a kid, he thought he was supposed to pronounce one nation indivisible as one nation in a dirigible.
Fragano Ledgister: plaintiff melody
This sounds like something from Trial by Jury.
Could have been Cop Rock.
Will someone let me in on what "malice of forethought" is supposed to be really? I've been rolling it over in my head and the original phrase just isn't coming.
I can't imagine quaffed hair. Wouldn't it stick in the throat?
Here's another one: I heard the word "pontiff" used for "plaintiff" recently in some news article about some court case; I don't recall there was a single pope or bishop involved.
According to dictionary.com (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Ed., Houghton Mifflin) "font of knowledge" is correct usage. (4. An abundant source; a fount: She was a font of wisdom and good sense.)
Under "fount" we also find a specific size and style of type within a type family. So they appear to be interchangeable for at least two different usages.
Dunno how the two words got tied together, or whether they just started that way. (Faint sighs of OED-lust can be heard, followed by the tappings of a price-search, then a sudden, terrible silence.)
Everybody please cover your trash. There's a cross-eyed bear in here somewhere. I think he's the plaintiff fawn's publicist.
On the 'look-say' vs 'phonics' battle, both are wrong, in that they are based on flawed cognitive theory.
I've been trying to align myself with one of them, and I can't quite do it. I get a visceral rather than a visual reaction to typos and grammatical errors, and good writing gives me a kind of physical pleasure. I also love puns and rhymes and have a good feel for verse rhythm, I think. But I wish I could do the thing my friends can do of visually rearranging the room in my head. I don't ever see *any* pictures in my head. (I don't even dream in images, that I remember at least.) Somehow it seems like I 'see' the words conceptually. Possibly this is only what you were describing.
Looking at the discussion again, I seem to have the same kind of mind for these things as Sam Kelly, which is a relief. I was beginning to feel left out among all these visual thinkers.
Cool! Some of my examples have been put on the front page!
(Slightly awkward! They have been attributed to Zander!)
And no place for "dually elected"?
I had a physics professor who used to refer to the "underlining principles" of whatever the topic of the day was, repeatedly. He also had a habit of underlining at the chalkboard, so perhaps the words were in fact synonymous for him.
Oh, and how about "advanced notice"? That one turns up a lot.
Whoops! Sorry, Candle. Attributions all fixed now.
Thanks! It felt a bit ridiculous to point it out, but I suppose this is a kind of proofreading thread. :)
I'm with SteveE here. The Empirical Storm Troopers are great. They're the little bespectacled guys with the scales and slide-rules who mutter things like, "That's one-point-three-seven give or take a gnat's whisker."
I've always been an excellent speller, and a terrible typist. I nearly always know exactly which word I want, and how to spell it. Nevertheless, my fingers often type another word entirely. Sometimes it's s homonym, sometimes not, but it's usually at least vaguely homophonic. Other times it's a case of automatically typing certain letter combinations such as -ing or -sion, whether or not they're appropriate. (In high school I could never type the name Ellison on the first try. It always came out "Ellision." Erasable bond was my friend in those days.)
Now, of course, I always find my typos the moment after I post them.
It's not just the physical act of typing that produces such effects, either. I often find the same kinds of "typos" in my handwritten drafts.
FWIW and all that.
swing your partners, dosie dough
Isn't that supposed to be "doe see d'oh?"
For the current and former Catholics in the crowd:
"Hail Mary
Full of Grapes"
Wait, that's heard, not written. Scratch that one.
E. writes, "I once was the third person in an email chain where the first person spelled it 'chord' and the second person spelled it 'cored.' Unfortunately, the word they wanted was 'cord.'"
The other night, I was reading David Maraniss' new biography of Roberto Clemente and ran across "vocal chord" [sic]. (In the 7th game of the 1960 World Series a bad hop caused a baseball to hit Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek in the throat, injuring his vocal cord. It was the second worst thing to happen to the Yankees in that game, notes the evilly-grinning Pirates fan at the keyboard.) I was wondering which player misfielded that error: the spell-check or the copyeditor with a bad ear for eggcorns. Although most likely it was a double play, and they both botched it.
P.S. After his playing days, Kubek became an announcer.
Karen Funk Blocher: I get that way too, sometimes, usually when I'm really tired or at least one sheet to the wind. I don't generally typo a word to not-a-word.
Usually I wind up noticing before I get to the end of whatever I'm trying to wright, because it allays ends up boing an embarrassing sound-alike weird of one short or an udder.
I believe Empirical Storm Troopers are the ones who say, "My direct experience tells me that I should hide behind a lot of boxes, never fire my weapon, (since it cannot hit the broad side of a planet anyway), and when spoken to by anyone carrying a red lightsaber, nod once vigorously and hide inside the heaviest available pipe until my external life-form sensor quits pinging. Also, if pursuing rebels and they blow the control on a blast door, shout 'Open the blast doors!' and then go find something else to do."
I had baited breath inedibly explained when watching a Mork and Mindy rerun containing the line "You waited with a worm on your tongue?"
And they say you don't learn from TV.
Inedibly explained? Well, I guess you wouldn't want a worm on your tongue...
(Begging your pardon if that was intentional, of course. Otherwise, I think you meant 'indelibly'.)
Vlad makes boo-koo bucks (Writerious)
Growing up in south Georgia *mumble* years ago, we used to say "boo-koos," meaning a lot, and we pronounced it exactly as it's spelled here. It wasn't until I took high school French that I realized we were mangling the word. I later learned they didn't say boo-koos in north Georgia, so I'm guessing it was a local language artifact.
I've been reading so much lewt speech and Singlish lately that I had to read some of these twice to see the problem.
cya ard m8
In re subjunctive:
I didn't learn it by age 5 (at least, I don't think I did), but I still use it correctly. The way I remember it is by recalling the most famous use of the subjunctive (see if you can place the following: "Daydle-diddle-deedle, daydle-diddle-deedle-deedle bum.")
About visual spelling/reading: I taught myself to read by age 2ish (according to my parents), and to this day, I am something of a speed-reader. When I read, I recognize entire words by their shapes, and will occasionally read an entire line at once. This, as you can imagine, is much faster than sounding out the words. From my experience, people who learn to read via the phonics method will read slower than those who read by shape, even after they (the first set) no longer need to sound out the words.
Finally, I'd pay to read a story titled "Under the Alien Yolk."
John M. Ford writes: "Speech is privilege."
You know, there's at least one F/SF story in that.
Been done: "The Man Who Had No Idea", by Thomas Disch.
More on-topic to the thread: Elf Sternberg of all people said recently on rasfw, "It is a tenant among evangelical Christians that 'atheism is impossible'".
I also know a person who thought for a long time that when haggling with a seller one tried to "chew them down". He told me that he wishes he could find everyone he unintentionally offended over the years, to apologize and explain; but this is impossible.
The sky above was the color of a Denver omelet, turned and just setting. Denver itself had been missing for eight years.
"It's not like I like alcohol in my protein," Cheese heard someone say as he hunted and pecked his way around the bar. "It's just that I'm denatured." It was a Beefbone voice and a Beefbone joke. The Coop -- at least the MIT side -- was a bar for professional eggheads; you could drink there for a week and never hear two clucks. . . .
. . . and that will be quite enough of that.
With malice of forethought is with malice aforethought, a British legal term. Used in the phrase `murder with malice aforethought'.
I've seen boo-koo bucks by people who know the difference between an é and an è; I've always read it as an ironic idiom. (I apologise; alliteration appeared, and afterwards avoided apprehension.)
Re: Kate's "Prime Madonna": The filk band Ookla the Mok wrote a song about Cher called "Pre-Madonna Prima Donna". It's pretty funny, although it's not on their album "Poor Man's Copyright".
I once saw "since time in memorial" and thought "the park?"
Seen today on a blog: "they think they're such a laugh ride."
Twice I've encountered people who expressed their bewilderment as to why a fine cut of meat was called "flaming yawn". I've never seen it written down though.
Growing up in south Georgia *mumble* years ago, we used to say "boo-koos," meaning a lot, and we pronounced it exactly as it's spelled here. It wasn't until I took high school French that I realized we were mangling the word. I later learned they didn't say boo-koos in north Georgia, so I'm guessing it was a local language artifact.
I expect that the use of beaucoup in south Georgia comes from the presence of Ft. Benning. The US Military took beaucoup (often spelled boo-koo) from its experiences in French Indochina. I believe it's service-wide.
I'm weighing in late to this since I've been out of the country since Wednesday, but I once came across a reference to nipples being "prehensile tissue."
I can only assume the author meant "erectile," but the image is...stunning.
Oh, and also, back when I taught literature and writing, I had a student give me a paper about the Elizabethan theater. He wanted to talk about the excitement of attending the theater by referencing the danger of being pickpocketed while watching the show. What he wrote was: "Attending the theater was exciting because at any moment one could be violated from behind."
Indeed.
And I wonder, does anyone else find their pleasure in rock songs to be directely proportional to the lyricist's ability to use the subjunctive correctly, or is it just me?
And don't get me *started* on Christmas carols.
Prehensile nippl...? I think I'll stick with Lisa Goldstein's alien yolk, Sarah.
The few proofreaders and copy editors of my acquaintance claim they catch more errors when reading hard copy rather than on-screen text. They aren't Luddites, so I'm wondering if there's a particular reason for this phenonenon.
Malthus: Once upon a time, I worked for a Boston-area polling firm that was conducting work for the upcoming gubernatorial primary in Kentucky...
In calling folks in "Versailles", I learned that it is, in fact, pronounced Vur-sales, accent on the 2nd syllable. Of course, how foolish of me. Silly Yankee.
Here's one I see small flurries of, on occasion: climatic battle. About the only movie that this phrase should apply to is a Japanese one called Otenki-oneesan (Weather Girl), which does in fact feature a magical combat between two weather girls at the end.
And as a complement to that, I should mention the game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, based on his earlier Civilization, which has a research-based faction called The University, whose bases are named for schools, laboratories and so on. One of the pre-generated base names is Climactic Research. Makes me think the Kinsey Institute made it on to the colony ship.
Richard Anderson, at least for me, online text is much easier to skim, even when seriously trying to give it a thorough reading. The hand is in the habit of scrolling through the text at a steady pace.
Hair-brained -- well, actually, there is the Shakespearean insult "she hath more hair than wit." So it kinda works.
protected static, there's a North Versailles near Pittsburgh, and it's also "Ver-SALES."
Hey, another Pirates fan! I heard Bob Prince's voice on a radio ad for that book, and it took me WAY back...
Just ran into this one:
'And then I wonder how people here (well, the lower 48) would feel if, for example, we would allow Alaska to succeed.' [emphasis mine]
Well, probably better than if we would allow Alaska to fail.
I know I catch more errors on paper than on screen. I suspect (but only suspect) that it has to do with either subliminal but distracting screen flicker, or with the higher resolution of most printouts than of most computer screens.
But I'm an empirical storm-trooper, not a research one, so I haven't even tried to test these hypotheses.
Pet peeve: The folks who say "Flaunted" when they mean "Flauted."
You flaunt your bodacious booty. You flaut the law...
To be even more pedantic, it's flout the law...a *flaut is what a flautist might play if it wasn't for the various vowel-shifts and such that permitted the pair flute/flautist.
I also have to print things out to do a final proof-read. Or two or three. It looks different on paper somehow -- things leap out at me more.
Janet -- I realized AFTER I posted that I'd used the wrong spelling of 'flout' -- bit by my own bug...ouch!
US pronunciation is a whole other topic. I live on Koch Lane. No two neighbours agree on how to pronounce it - cock, cosh, coke, cotch, coach. None of them rhyme it with loch, though that would be the (presumably original) German.
Which reminds me of Waugh's Loved One, where the English protagonists pronunciation of Medici is ridiculed as 'making Mr Medissy sound like some kinda wop'
Just saw someone talking about "vice grips" on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site.
Much as I cringe at "comrpised of" and twitch a bit at "different than," the language is continually evolving and "set in stone" dictates of spelling and grammar can remind me at times of Creationists scoffing at Darwin. Back when the pedants were scribbling in Latin and the peasants were illiterate, no one tried to standardize (or, as the Brits would have it, "standardise") spelling -- that's why a lot of Chaucer's less archaic vocabulary can look like plain Bad Spelling now (see some of the Middle Englysshe" thread for examples).
Archaic terms like "just deserts"*, and even "kid gloves", are particularly likely to run through the mangle and come out like so many of the terms English has absorbed/stolen from other languages. (If not for that, we might still be limited to Anglo Saxon or Celtic.)
Some of you have some interesting talents -- seeing typos in red, etc. I have a little bit of synaesthesia (associating certain numbers with colors), and years of doing British cryptic crosswords have given me the occasional ability to decode anagrams instantaneously. (Doesn't always work, but it's handy when it does!)
*Incidentally, there used to be a bakery (in Berkeley, I think) called Just Desserts.
"The language is eveloving" doesn't make me feel better about "comprised of". Language shifts that ambiguate (is that a word?) the language really, really bug me.
Yes, I know it's a losing battle.
It's gotten so no one can trust what's meant by the word "bimonthly". If you have to follow it up with "And by that I mean [once every two months | twice a month]" then you might as well not use the word at all. The loss of viable words is a sad thing.
*sigh*
I'm guilty of correcting "faze" to "phase" though. I was under the (apparently) mistaken impression that "faze" wasn't a real word, but a corruption of some verb version of "phase".
Subjunctive, now--the cure for that is to learn a second language. Granted, I was in my sixth year of Spanish before I could use the subjunctive with any confidence, but once I could, I suddenly understood it in English much better.
protected static and Janet Croft:
Versailles, KY is down the road apiece from Athens, KY (pronounced w/ a long 'a').
Nicole: I had a similar experience with subjunctive. I got to try explaining it (as one of the two fourth-year students) to the third-year class in HS. I don't know if they understood it - I had to do it in German - but I certainly got it straight.
Athens, KY (pronounced w/ a long 'a')
What about Athens, Georgia?
I'm with Nicole on the evolution of language thing. I care that some important distinctions are being lost and will have to be reinvented. As I tell my students, a good writer is never ambiguous except on purpose.
I thought "different than" was standard American. Is it frowned upon in the US too? I think I saw Teresa complain about it a short while ago.
years of doing British cryptic crosswords have given me the occasional ability to decode anagrams instantaneously
Yes, I can sometimes do that, and for exactly the same reason. I also have the strange habit of automatically reading words backwards as well as forwards, as if to check whether there is some hidden meaning. I have no idea why I do this, as I can't think of many circumstances in which it would be a benefit. But it's just ingrained now.
The lovely new Evil Editor blog quotes a query letter:
I felt that approaching you with a synapse rather than an unsolicited manuscript.....
Xopher:
The more times you see a word spelled correctly, and see the correct choice made between homophones, the more likely you are to get it right when you write...so I'd say "read, and having read, write right, and your paper will be read, but less red."
Too true, and not just for spelling. It's also a real argument against the "Fix these sentences" sort of grammar worksheets: Studies have shown that after a class reads and "corrects" 25-50 sentences with errors, more students -- although not always the same ones -- will start having trouble with the errors they've been working on -- thank you visual reinforcement!
BTW I think children (as opposed to adolescents or young adults) should not be taught the word 'homonym' at all. Appallingly, it's used for both homophones AND homographs, which are entirely different things. This makes it virtually impossible to explain the situation of 'red', which is homophonous with 'read' (past), which is homographic with 'read' (present), which is homophonous with 'reed'.
Not that I believe in using 'homophone' and 'homograph' in grade or junior high school either. If your goal is to teach them Greek, sure. If your goal is to improve their spelling by getting a concept across, no. Call them 'sound-alike words' and 'look-alike words'.(/i>
Weird. When I was growing up they taught us homophones were the sound-alikes (bear/bare; to/too/two) and homonyms ["same name"?] were the ones that were spelled the same (bear n/bear v). Wonder if it's a local variant or a "personal error"?
galley slave:
He gave her organism after organism
That's the plot summary of "A Partridge in a Pear [NOT Pair] Tree", isn't it?
Writerious, an example of a correct usage: "Vocal chords sound entirely different from instrumental ones; for example, a grating dissonance on a piano can be the most exquisite harmony in a choir."
As Scott pointed out, they all mean something. This is what makes it fun. As I have pointed out elsewhere, even "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" has meaning, even if it's a struggle to find it; sentences are not constrained to "make sense" any more than they're constrained to be true.
One of the pre-generated base names is Climactic Research. Makes me think the Kinsey Institute made it on to the colony ship.
Either that, or it's the Eschatology Department.
I used to be able to look at a page fresh from the printer and find a typo on it before I (thought I) had time to read it. Reading internet spellings has somewhat eroded that ability...since I'm busy trying NOT to notice people's misspellings.
And: Newark, NJ is pronounced Nerk or maybe N(w)erk by its natives. Newark, OH is pronounced Nerkahigh. Newark, DE is pronounced New Ark (as in, not the one Noah built...there's even a New Ark (spelled that way) church there). Only outsiders say Newwerk.
And when Texans come to New York and try to find Houston Street, no one knows what they're talking about.
a good writer is never ambiguous except on purpose.
I quite like that.
If my search function is working, we've reached this point in the proceedings without "speech/speach."
A colleague sent me an angry e-mail after I asked her to do one thing too many:
"I am not at your beckon call," she wrote.
Pedantic Peasant: most likely a local error.
Oh! Oh! "They went out shooting peasants"!!!!! I think I saw that one...didn't remember until now.
Another pair is supercede/supersede. I think the first might be a real word, but it tends to be used where they should have the second.
(and, from above, maybe Alaska will succeed, but probably not if it secedes.)
candle: I read words backwards, too. I started after reading some comments by Ursula K. Le Guin regarding how she came up with the name for the city in 'Those Who Walk Away From Omelas'. She mentioned that she often read road signs backwards and got inspired by the result from Salem, Oregon.
I thought, "Neat!" and have been doing the same ever since. No inspirations, though.
P J Evans: AFAIK 'supercede' solely exists as a misspelling of 'supersede'.
In Illinois, we have long-a Athens, New Berlin (accent on the first syllable), and Vienna (long i).
Mister Spock I had some confusion with Dr. Spock and Mr. Spock; in my defense, I was five at the time.
Athens, KY (pronounced w/ a long 'a')
What about Athens, Georgia?
Athens, Georgia is pronounced like Athens, Greece.
Cairo, Georgia is pronounced with a long "a" though.
I expect that the use of beaucoup in south Georgia comes from the presence of Ft. Benning. The US Military took beaucoup (often spelled boo-koo) from its experiences in French Indochina. I believe it's service-wide
Thank you! Nice to know its provenance.
Cole Porter's hometown of Peru, IN is pronounced with a long E. And Pierre, the capital of South Dakota, is "Peer." If you ask certain locals how Louisville, KY is pronounced, they will tell you that it's "Lew-iss-vill," with what passes for deadpan in the Ohio Valley.
Also, it's the New MAD-rid Fault, not pronounced like the Espanish Ecity.
But this takes us far outfield.
Here in Athens, Georgia, we pronounce it with a short "a". Buena Vista, Georgia, however, is pronounced "BYOO-nah VIST-ah" and Cairo "CAY-row". The ancient accepted pronunciations of nearby Dacula seem to be day-CYOOL-ah and day-COOL-ah, but Duh-CYOOL-ah is gaining popularity (much as I would like to say DAK-you-lah).
I learned about the subjunctive mood in the 6th grade, when it was introduced in German class (although I had encountered it earlier). Thoroughly confused, we asked our English teacher "what's a subjunctive" and she stopped regular lessons to teach us the English grammar she realized we were missing. Bless you, Miss Candler! It was also about this time that I realized that Marvel comics was (were?) dedicated to the preservation of the subjunctive. So many titles were "If this be ...[fill in the blank]".
How do you pronounce Sodom, if you're from Sodom, NY?
And . . . are their dinosaurs there?
I (and my teammates) are still mildly aggravated about the trivia game wherein the fellow reading the questions referred to a reclusive book character rather than an elusive one, resulting in us answering Shrek rather than Waldo.
Does anyone still care about the distinction between "gantlet" and "gauntlet"? Please say yes.
The one that irritates me most - the one that actually makes me yell at books, newspapers and my spouse - is mixing-up cavalry and Calvary.
Linkmeister : "To one with such a gift, surfing the Web must feel uncomfortably like being drunk."
That doesn't describe my reaction, which is more of a mild revulsion or despair, coupled with an immediate feeling that the balance of the content is untrustworthy. "If the writer can't even spell..."
I tend to feel mildly seasick, and become mightily afraid that my own spelling will somehow suffer.
I save the worry about trustworthiness for restaurant menus, thusly: "If they can't spell it, I probably shouldn't eat it."
And . . . are their dinosaurs there?
Whose dinosaurs?
She mentioned that she often read road signs backwards and got inspired by the result from Salem, Oregon.
Which is, coincidentally, where I live (until June). Perhaps it's a sign. Well, in a different sense. Now we just have to work out what it's a sign of...
If we are going to cover mispronounced place-names - and we probably shouldn't - I ought to point out that the Americans are not necessarily the worst offenders. How about Beaulieu on the south coast of England, for instance? [Bew-ley, I believe.] And I am still unsure as to how I am supposed to be pronouncing Pontefract. Is anyone in Yorkshire?
"Dire á Dale." Right, right...
The Morose Men, you say? I think I've heard of them. Thought they had a violinist in the group tho' - I know I've been told that they like to fiddle around.
[Is this where I apologize? ;)]
Nebraska has the towns of Juniata, pronounced june-ee-ET-ah, and Waneeta, pronounced like most of us would say the first.
I'm delighted to discover other people who have the same nearly subconscious response to spelling errors. I'll glance at a page of type, think, 'there's a spelling error on this page,' and then will have to actually read the text to find it.
On the other thread - I got destroyed by local place (and other names) when I moved to Boston from Toronto. Knowing how to pronounce things properly in French is a serious burden in Boston. Who'd think that 'Faneuil' rhymes with 'flannel'? (Or 'fan-yel' - take your pick.) I once had a frustrating conversation - on both sides, I'm sure - with a Greyhound service agent about trying to take the bus to Montreal via Montpelier.
And it took me a year to stop saying 'Boston Celtics' with a hard 'c' (in my defense, the cultural term comes up a lot more often in my casual discourse than the sports team).
I apologize for coming back so late (I always spend way too much time here, and yet never enough), but:
Teresa said: Murgatroyd, if by "outsourced copyediting" you mean using freelancers rather than in-house employees, I've been one of those freelancers, I've hired more of them than I can count, and they can be extraordinarily good. If yours aren't good, get better ones. They're out there.
Actually I guess that was inaccurate. I meant "offshored copyediting" -- the firms our publisher employs have offices in Manila and India -- and the primary qualification is low rates, not editorial skill. This is the third set of production firms we have been through (we've complained our way out of two others, one of which was US-based). Knowing the language well enough to correct its use is essential for a job like this, and although the production firm claims that it continually updates its copyeditors' language skills, the results are woefully inadequate.
We've invited a local freelancer (who also has access to compositing services) to send a proposal, but since the local's rate is approximately 4 times higher per page than the offshored rate, I don't have much hope that we'll be allowed to secede.
One of the things we never did was accept offers from "copyediting firms" who proposed to have their (nameless) copyeditors work on our manuscripts. That never works. Quality control goes all to hell. As Martha Schwartz said, "If they're good enough to work on our books, they're good enough to take our copyediting test and work for us directly." Also: "We don't use anonymous copyeditors."
I wish we had the same sort of control, but our publisher uses freelance editorial offices (us). They used to have in-house copyediting, which was marvelous -- a good copyeditor can surgically improve text without ever revealing his or her presence -- but academic publishing is up against the Internet and PLoS, and they're choking on the idea that their days are numbered.
A personal nemesis: Discreet/discreet. Auuuuugh!
Um, Jerry. Try again.
Some senator said "flounder" yesterday when he meant "founder."
Avram writes of ingenious new products in speculative fiction:
"Taught muscles" obviously benefit from some sort of hi-tech direct reflex implantation. "Bated Breath" is a brand of pheremonal lozenge.
Sadly, Avram appears to me to have mis-misspelled "bated."
Cliche sighting:......Arrests have become a right of passage for a growing list of "Sopranos" cast members:......
2 More 'Sopranos' Run Afoul of the Law
May 2, 3:26 PM (ET)
By TOM HAYS
NEW YORK (AP)
I've always understood they're both wrong it's vocal folds?
Afterthought:
Someone upthread said that "Font of all knowledge" was not correct, and that only "fount" will do. I'm flabbergasted. I though "font" was a legitimate (if archaic) abbreviation for "fountain", and, given the choice, I always preferred the way it sounded on the idiom.
Amusingly approriate to this thread: This morning, I spotted a young man with a t-shirt with something like this written on the back:
"If money talks, the whole world gone listen."
It might have been a song lyric or a quote by someone (there was a picture on the back of someone I did not recognize).
Murgatroyd:
I meant "offshored copyediting" -- the firms our publisher employs have offices in Manila and India -- and the primary qualification is low rates, not editorial skill. This is the third set of production firms we have been through (we've complained our way out of two others, one of which was US-based).Aw, cripes, I've been waiting for that to happen: non-copyeditors over here taking the word of offshore text-services packagers that their employees are up to snuff, and cheap!
Knowing the language well enough to correct its use is essential for a job like this, and although the production firm claims that it continually updates its copyeditors' language skills,No no no. If you're having to "continually update your employees' skills," you aren't working with the real thing. Real copyeditors have broad and deep lifetime accumulations of expertise.
-- the results are woefully inadequate.And, I'm certain, a terrible waste of money. That's the thing about copyediting: if done well, it supports and compensates for problems and complications in all the other phases of production. If done badly, it's hideously expensive to fix, and raises the price of all kinds of other operations. While it's possible to pay too much for good copyediting, it's also hard to do it.
What's even more expensive is excessively cheap copyediting, which can easily cost you six to eight times its ostensible price. Really, there's no other stage of production where so many hatchling problems can be squashed by a small but tightly-packed wad of money landing on top of them.
We've invited a local freelancer (who also has access to compositing services) to send a proposal, but since the local's rate is approximately 4 times higher per page than the offshore rate, I don't have much hope that we'll be allowed to secede.I hear Nancy Hanger/Windhaven has available capacity, and she can get you good deals on other production services. Windhaven did all of Baen's very trying production work until Jim Baen let them go in a fit of what one piously hopes is temporary insanity. Or, if you're just looking for a copyeditor, ask Robert Legault there (Robert L) whether he's free. There are a number of freelance copyeditors and proofreaders posting to this thread, but Robert was my right-hand guy when I was Mg. Ed. at Tor, and he's very good.
(Okay, okay: so are the rest of you. All right? I know you're there.)
Penny wise and pound foolish. Tell 'em I said that good copyediting is always cheaper than the alternative.One of the things we never did was accept offers from "copyediting firms" who proposed to have their (nameless) copyeditors work on our manuscripts. That never works. Quality control goes all to hell. As Martha Schwartz said, "If they're good enough to work on our books, they're good enough to take our copyediting test and work for us directly." Also: "We don't use anonymous copyeditors."I wish we had the same sort of control, but our publisher uses freelance editorial offices (us). They used to have in-house copyediting, which was marvelous -- a good copyeditor can surgically improve text without ever revealing his or her presence -- but academic publishing is up against the Internet and PLoS, and they're choking on the idea that their days are numbered.
Scraps said:
You're talking about the subjunctive mood, and part of why it's disappearing is that it's so complicated (and unnecessary) that most people who get it right do so only instinctively, and not one hundred percent of the time.
You're right about the instinctive part -- I don't ever remember having actual grammar lessons in school (I had New Math also), so I've absorbed most of what I know from reading (and checking up on aforementioned copyeditors). I find grammar lessons boring; there are few things more tedious than searching for a rule to back up my sense that something in the language is off. But here is what I meant by conditional tense:
If a case-control study were completed successfully in these areas that would also provide some evidence that question 2 could be answered affirmatively. (original)
If a case-control study was completed successfully in these areas, then there will be some evidence that question 2 can be answered affirmatively. (copyedited)
The author was speculating on the import of the results of a nonexistent case-control study. That sounds conditional to me.
However, the reason I picked up on it is the copyedited sentence just clunks in the ear, at least to me, and it could be argued that the meaning is altered by the changes, which is a cardinal sin for copyediting in a journal.
Marilee, was the senator talking about something sinking? I suppose people might flounder around a bit then. Or was he confusing a fish with someone who started something?
I've read that Illinois (pron ill-en-noy) was originally how the French wrote down phonetically what the local natives called that discrete area, presumably pronounced ee-en-wah.
Is it true that locals there call Greenwich Village "green witch" instead of "grennitch", or is this a mere calumny?
Still trying to work out what a "laugh ride" is ... <she hinted discreetly>
Is it true that locals there call Greenwich Village "green witch" instead of "grennitch", or is this a mere calumny?I haven't been a local for 36 years, but I've heard the name a good many times, and never as "green witch."
Still trying to work out what a "laugh ride" is ...Laugh riot. Or it's something the Clown Mafia takes people on.
Teresa --
That's the thing about copyediting: if done well, it supports and compensates for problems and complications in all the other phases of production. If done badly, it's hideously expensive to fix, and raises the price of all kinds of other operations.
About a month ago I sent our managing editor a 22-page document listing copyediting and compositing errors for two issues. It caused some embarrassment, but I'm not sure about any lasting change. However, if we keep sending things back for corrections, we may drive up their prices.
Recently one editor-in-chief of a journal in this publisher's stable had to publish a letter of apology because a typographer had reformatted some quoted text used in an editorial so it looked as though the EIC had plagiarized it (properly formatted on proof pages, !poof! gone in the print version). I don't know who pointed it out, but it certainly caused a collective gasp among the editorial offices in our group.
As one of the issue publishers said, How long before they realize this is costing them money and they bring it all back in house again?
Thank you for the leads -- I will certainly see what I can do to follow up.
Various members of my mother's side of the family lived in "Grennidge" village for decades.
A while back, we all got a scandalized kick out of an advert for Greenwich Savings Bank, in which the lady announcer pronounced it "green witch."
If we are going to cover mispronounced place-names - and we probably shouldn't - I ought to point out that the Americans are not necessarily the worst offenders. How about Beaulieu on the south coast of England, for instance? [Bew-ley, I believe.] And I am still unsure as to how I am supposed to be pronouncing Pontefract. Is anyone in Yorkshire?
Oh, we have a long tradition of mispronouncing old names. Just off the top of my head I can think of Chalmondeley, Featherstoneshaugh, and Magdelane (College, Oxford), pronounced Chumly, Fanshaw, and Maudlin, respectively.
(That reminds me of Alfred Bester picking English place-names for surnames in The Stars, My Destination for their exoticism to American ears.)
As to Pontefract, I've always pronounced it Pontefrakt with a schwa instead of an e. But I'm a southerner, so don't take my word for it.
"Illinois (pron ill-en-noy) was originally how the French wrote down phonetically..."
See "Owyhee" for Hawaii.
Greg L. --
Sorry for the post-and-run. Yes, Glen got it right: my student meant to type "mosquito spray" and instead carpet bombed the fly for all time with "misquote spray". I'd assigned Tim O'Brien's _The Things They Carried_ that semester, and we read not only that short story but also "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," from which another student got "broad soldiers" instead of "broad shoulders." I didn't quite have the heart to tell them that many of the soldiers O'Brien depicted would have been rail-thin and possibly even undernourished or malnourished -- the only "broad soldiers" would have been the rear echelon desk jockeys.
While our esteemed host can't vouch for my skills directly (I've somehow never worked for Tor), I am currently available for copyediting, if anyone is looking. (Unlike Nancy, I can't provide compositing.)
This just in, on a final essay: "He spoke for the poor and those who really did not have a voice in the public eye."
I find grammar lessons boring; there are few things more tedious than searching for a rule to back up my sense that something in the language is off.
I never had formal grammar lessons at school and now I love them. But then, I do teach Latin and love Latin grammar, so I am probably not a representative member of the modern world. Or indeed the human race. But what you are talking about with your conditionals is the difference between 'unreal' (or 'contrary-to-fact') conditionals - which require the subjunctive in the protasis, as you noted - and 'real' (or 'factual') conditionals, which use the indicative. So everyone is right, and this is a rare case where failing to use the subjunctive totally changes the meaning of the sentence.
But see: isn't it fun to play with this obscure vocabulary in support of your instinctive grasp of grammar? Part of the reason I love Latin is that it often points out to me why English grammar does certain odd things.
I think Nicole is right about font vs. fount - they are both archaisms or technical terms, and both mean the same thing (from the Latin: fons). The question, I suppose, is which is better established in the common idiom. But it can be dangerous to decide grammar by googling.
And I presume Marilee's politician was claiming that some plan or other would flounder on some obstacle. Which is possible, I suppose, but probably wrong in context.
Oh, and my problem with "Pontefract" is that I have heard it pronounced "Pumfrey". I don't know if this is a restricted usage or not, and I can't now remember the context. But it is not totally implausible as an English pronunciation.
Also, Des Moines.
Since I'm marking papers, I do see things that make my mind boggle. Here's another:"Mill understood that the body cannot with stain, what the mind does not understand."
Well, Google gives me a possible answer on the Pontefract issue. Apparently in Shakespeare it is pronounced (and spelled) "Pomfret", and the castle and sometimes Pontefract cakes are still pronounced the same way; but the town has gone with the spelling and is pronounced as NelC has it. No doubt information yanked at random off the internet is entirely unreliable, but it will do me for now. Unless there really is anyone from the West Riding hanging around.
Commiserations on the paper-grading, Fragano. Mine doesn't start for a few days yet, thankfully.
Candle: I don't finish till next week (I give take-home finals, and collect the last lot on Tuesday). I keep coming across things like this: "The ideas of the theorists that will be altercated in this paper more or less focus on liberal democracy (Cugoano and John Stuart Mill) and cultural identity as a value that is thought of when defining liberal democracy (Emma Goldman and Malcolm X)."
That's an altercation I'd avoid.
Doubtless this has been said upthread, but mistakes like these result from automated spell-checking.
I saw "take stalk of" for "take stock of" in an academic review in a VERY prestigious academic journal in Classics, which has a very high bit-rate and probably cannot afford proofreaders. The academic author is held responsible for all mistakes.
Unless there really is anyone from the West Riding hanging around.
I'm not from around there, but I can show off a little tidbit that I learned about it. "Riding", as in the English locale name/administrative division, is itself an eggcorn that derives from the Norse word for "third".
Citing the OED etymology for riding:
Late OE. type *þriðing or *þriding (recorded only in Latin contexts or forms), ad. ON. þriðjung-r third part, f. þriði third: see -ING. The initial consonant was subsequently absorbed by the preceding t or th of east, west, north.
Thus, "West Thriding" became "West Riding".
By the way, some might find the "Latin contexts" mentioned in the OED citation to be of interest, so here they are:
a1066 Laws Edin. Conf. 31 (Lieberman), Erant etiam potestates super wapentagiis quas trehingas uocabant, scilicet super terciam partem prouincie.
1086 Domesday Bk. (1783) 375 Treding dicit quod non habet ibi nisi ix acras et dimid.
1215 Magna Carta §25 Omnes comitatus, hundredi, wapentakii, et trethingii, sint ad antiquas firmas.
I have a friend who once wrote me a letter about "sewing her wild oats." The reason I've remembered it all these years is that she was going to the Fashion Institute of Technology at the time.
Found today:
... dragging his heals like a child ...
That's one dreadful phrase that won't find its way into the wild. (This thread is more like a zoo, or maybe a quarantine pen.)
Then there's the news story that circulated several years ago (i.e. almost certainly apocryphal) about the Neo-Nazi who went before the court to change his name in honor of his hero.
Yes, that's right.
Hi Hitler.
One from the paper this morning, complaining about yet another crack-brained school program: "English teachers, formally enthusiastic about their subject, have become less so..." In a letter from a school principal. Or maybe principle. Who knows?
Isn't it interesting how many of us o/u/r/ are making mistakes in the very examples we use to talk about mistakes, even when forced to preview the posts?
I (and my teammates) are still mildly aggravated about the trivia game wherein the fellow reading the questions referred to a reclusive book character rather than an elusive one
With regard to comprise/compose and many, many others, the issue isn't whether the evolving of the language willy-nilly is a threat or a menace, and whether it's tragic that many fine distinctions are supposedly being lost (and in the case of comprise/compose it's hard to argue that any useful distinction is being lost, inasmuch as either word can be replaced with some variant of "make up"); the issue is that the distinctions often have not historically existed in the manner that pedants claim.
The difficult thing to accept is that a/r/e/ our language has no solid objective base of rules. It exists in an uneasy tug between common use and authority. When you cite "correct" meanings of words under dispute, you are citing (either explicitly or implicitly) an authority (or consensus of authorites). As Robert L pointed out above, what is under dispute changes, and yesterday's mistakes may be today's accepted use, or may still be under attack. If you want to accept authority on these matters, great; but it's also useful to keep in mind the history of use of a word, and the history of the dispute. Many of these things were simply decided more or less arbitratily by pedants at a detectable point in history, and handed down through generations of teachers and pedantic writers who rarely questioned the things they were told as children, even when they made no sense (such as the notion that it is incorrect to split infinitives, or that the phrase-adverbial use of "hopefully" is incorrect).
While I am charmed to find "wapentagiis" in a Latin context, I was expecting to see the relevant bit of late Old English, or an identifiable form thereof. Can someone clarify this, so I don't have to strain my eyes on my photo-reduced OED? Is "trethingi" as close as we get?
A vintage example I spotted today:
Nekrokedeia; or, The art of embalming, wherein is shewn the right of burial, the funeral ceremonies, and the several ways of preserving dead bodies in most nations of the world. (Thomas Greenhill, 1705)
joann wrote:
I save the worry about trustworthiness for restaurant menus, thusly: "If they can't spell it, I probably shouldn't eat it."
I think you're missing out. One of my favorite restaurants (called, as it happens, "JoAnn's") has a menu riddled with errors; and when it comes to barbecue, apostrophe abuse is your hallmark of quality.
Is "trethingi" as close as we get?
Unfortunately, that's all there is. As it said, "recorded only in Latin contexts or forms".
If there is an actual OE use of "thriding", it isn't in the online OED.
If typoed food could not be et, New York Chinese restaurants would go bankrupt.
Lest we forget the whole subset of errors found overseas, I remind all of Engrish. It's evolved (in the sense of "more and more of it can be found") from when I lived in Japan in the early 1970s.
As I struggle with finals, gems continue to pop up. Here's another: "Bob Marley and Reggae served as a median to the entire world."
As a fan of Craigslist, I find there are some of these phrases that are peculiar to the self-written want ad mode: people offering "rod iron" furniture and items that are fully "in tact" as well.
Ulrika...in tact I won't tell them that their usage is wrong...unless they have some new (and, I must expect, unpleasant) design for furniture.
"one nation in a dirigible"
Can't remember the article, but one writer remembers her pledge as "one Asian, in the vestibule."
J Austin: Back when I was in grad school, the campus conservative rag attacked the administration for removing the 'last vestibules of fun and merriment' on the campus. I recall wondering how much fun one could have in a vestibule.
Things like "cord" and "chord" can be sneaky. After all, "discordant."
The husband is of the group that measures words without reading them first. With street signs, especially. When he can make out the first letter, he then guesses what street we're approaching by the length of the word. Drives me as crazy as I do him with driving by landmark instead of proper directions.
He does the same with hearing, though. The syllables are right, the number of words is right, but it comes out, "Hey, is this a Zubic Micronium?"
I've always been the opposite: knew a lot of big words from reading them, but shamed myself constantly when mispronouncing them in conversation.
Adam S:
Yeah, me too. The first time I ever heard "debacle" said, my brain tripped over the ungainly emphasis. I still say it my way in my head.
I actually got accused of cheating in a Renaissance and Reformation history class because I sounded like such a damn hick when I opened my mouth, that my professer was certain I'd either written my essay before the test period, or had an upperclassman do it.
David Goldfarb wrote:
> Elf Sternberg of all people said recently on rasfw, "It is a tenant among evangelical Christians that 'atheism is impossible'".
That *is* unlike him. May be it wasn't a typo and he meant that it was a meme which had moved into their heads and wouldn't leave.
pedantic peasant writes:
> Too true, and not just for spelling. It's also a real argument against the "Fix these sentences" sort of grammar worksheets: Studies have shown that after a class reads and "corrects" 25-50 sentences with errors, more students -- although not always the same ones -- will start having trouble with the errors they've been working on -- thank you visual reinforcement!
In my last year of school I encountered the mnemonic RAVEN - Remember Affect Verb, Effect Noun. Now that's a nice little mnemonic, but up unitl that time I'd just automatically got affect/effect right. Now I need to dredge up that damned acronym every time I use either word.
Tim Walters: I suppose it could have been showing the correct way of burial, as in "you have the right of it".
I've been curious to know how I'd do on the Tor copyediting test ever since I heard about it. Is there any way I can arrange to get a look at it?
Candle was talking about how Latin handles conditionals. Some of you may recall that I've been studying Greek, and I'm here to tell you that Greek does some really funky things with them. I won't burden the comment thread with the details.
Has anyone had 'viscous attack' yet? There are a lot of apparently treacle-coated vampires on BtVS sites.
My favourite near-miss so far as a newspaper copy-editor may not count as phonetic, but have it anyway: "Symphony in a Flat".
Scraps, the OED supports my usage. Seventh sense of the word, with cites from 1611 to 1858. Admittedly the OED also has "uncircumcisedness" as a word, and I wouldn't consider any dictionary as prescriptive anyway, but I would consider that a long enough history to allow the usage of "aggravated" in this manner.
From one of my early manuscripts: "Gradually the spirit solidified into corporal form."
Eleanor: What happened when it made sergeant?
This monstrosity had me (metaphorically) tearing my hair out last night: "Cultural identity then creates a problem, with Cugoano he had a liberal way of thinking but his philosophy surrounded the people of Africa, he sought out to change his own cultural group to better society, and not to all mankind."
My thought was simply "What the French Connection UK does that MEAN?"
My mind was then soothed by a more traditional transposition: "Original Rastas (Rastafarianism was a new religion) surfaced with the thoughts of Marcus Gravey."
Coming late to the pronunciation-of-placenames subthread, I can contribute three where I've lived: Sannazay (San Jose) and Oaklund (not "land") in California, and current home Preskut (Prescott) AZ, which sounds more like "press kit" than "press cot" in localspeak. Time seems to erode away vowels and syllables -- as in some of those old British burgs and counties where five syllables boil down to three -- but the shorthand of familiarity can do the same.
While transcribing a Locus interview, I came across a lovely rant against applying Latin rules to English grammar (espec. the split infinitive), but alas it ranged too far from topic to use. If the interviewee (he knows who he is) cares to get it out in public, "Making Light" is a good place for it. And I no longer proofread Locus, so can't be blamed for the "comprised of" that shows up in the current issue's YA section, but will apologize anyway!
The totally embarassing Mike McCurry over in his eponymous sidelight says:
You all worship at Vince Cerf who has a clear financial interest in the outcome of this debate but you immediately castigate all of us who disagree and impune our motives.
Apart from not knowing this Cerf person at whom I'm supposed to be worshipping, I am struck by the verb to impune. From context, seems to be a critical or at least a negative action, so I don't think it can be related to impunity. Perhaps it means to mock using a pune, or play on wordes.
Seen on a health care email list: "Our hospital was in the mist of a project ..."
I've been in hospitals like that.
In my last year of school I encountered the mnemonic RAVEN - Remember Affect Verb, Effect Noun. Now that's a nice little mnemonic, but up unitl that time I'd just automatically got affect/effect right.
Except that it's not right.
'Affect' is a noun. It's a psychiatric term meaning, roughly, observable mood.
'Effect' is a verb, meaning 'cause to happen'. One speaks of 'effecting a change' in something. So confusing the two here is particularly bad: "I effected the abolition of the semicolon" (=I wiped out semicolons) is very different from "I affected the abolition of the semicolon" (=I had some effect on it; maybe I slowed it down).
A lot of the mishearings are vivid. "A viscous attack in the media" - ie mud sticks and is hard to scrape off.
Also: "fine tooth-comb" - what? For combing teeth?
"Fine-tooth comb" please.
British placenames are great for confusing the unwary foreigner who, until arriving, thought he/she could read and speak. They fall into three categories:
BASIC: England
Leicester
Derby
Holborn
Middlesborough
Pontefract
INTERMEDIATE: Oxford and Cambridge
Gonville & Caius
Magdalen
Magdalene (which is which?)
Worcester
Wadham
ADVANCED: Scotland
Dalyell (pronounced Dalziel)
Menzies (not pronounced Menzies)
Sgurr nan Ceathreamhnan
Beinn a'Chlaidheimh
Meall Ghaordaidh
Spotted within the last couple of weeks:
- A website selling "mid-evil style" jewelry.
- Music being played "on queue."
Fairly common in Britain if not elsewhere: "I can't be asked to do that."
re: "Symphony in a Flat" -- this is not actually an error at all. There is a standard convention where the key of a piece is rendered in lower-case if it is minor, and upper-case if major. Thus, a symphony in a flat is really in A flat minor.
I would be more worried about a symphony in an apartment.
Fragano Ledgister --This monstrosity had me (metaphorically) tearing my hair out last night: "Cultural identity then creates a problem, with Cugoano he had a liberal way of thinking but his philosophy surrounded the people of Africa, he sought out to change his own cultural group to better society, and not to all mankind."
My thought was simply "What the French Connection UK does that MEAN?"
When faced with writing of that sort, my usual reaction was to write a referral to the Undergraduate Writing Center. The miscreant's subsequent exams and papers invariably were in clear English. I once had a student who seemed to have been trained by Lacan or Derrida; an entire exam was full of stuff like you quoted, only decorated with postmodernist artcrit babble. Three or four weeks' worth of UWC fixed them right up. I have no idea how the Center did it, but it sure worked.
I just found this one in a library publication: low-and-behold.
--Mary Aileen
Niall McAuley:
The totally embarassing Mike McCurry over in his eponymous sidelight says:
You all worship at Vince Cerf who has a clear financial interest in the outcome of this debate but you immediately castigate all of us who disagree and impune our motives.
Apart from not knowing this Cerf person at whom I'm supposed to be worshipping, I am struck by the verb to impune. From context, seems to be a critical or at least a negative action, so I don't think it can be related to impunity. Perhaps it means to mock using a pune, or play on wordes.
I'd guess he meant impugn. Or perhaps you knew that and were being amusing.
Ajay:
Also: "fine tooth-comb" - what? For combing teeth?
"Fine-tooth comb" please.
I've always heard it as fine-toothed comb, which makes it much clearer where the tooth bites.
Tim Walters -- joann wrote:
I save the worry about trustworthiness for restaurant menus, thusly: "If they can't spell it, I probably shouldn't eat it."
I think you're missing out. One of my favorite restaurants (called, as it happens, "JoAnn's") has a menu riddled with errors; and when it comes to barbecue, apostrophe abuse is your hallmark of quality.
Scraps :
If typoed food could not be et, New York Chinese restaurants would go bankrupt.
I was actually thinking more of the aspirant "maison de la casa haus"-type places that never consulted any sort of written authority when producing their menus full of recipes from the foreign. Apostrophes are, IMO, a totally lost cause--F'ghu's sake, I found "it's" as a possessive in the NYT the other day!
In my last year of school I encountered the mnemonic RAVEN - Remember Affect Verb, Effect Noun.
To add to your troubles with this, there is also a noun 'affect' ("He exhibited the flat affect typical of patients with this injury") and a verb 'effect' ("Our purpose is to effect positive change in the race relations in our community").
While transcribing a Locus interview, I came across a lovely rant against applying Latin rules to English grammar (espec. the split infinitive), but alas it ranged too far from topic to use.
I tend to let it go at "The English language Latin that same thing not is." I got this from Teresa, but I'm not certain it's original with her.
Rob Kerr - still, a dash is de rigeur, surely? "Symphony in a-Flat"? But it's also odd to write it that way. Ordinarily you either spell the whole thing out (A Flat Minor) or use the symbol ♭ (A♭ == A-Flat Major; a♭ == A-Flat Minor).
a♭ is a pretty weird key anyway, if you ask me.
(Btw, for those who care, ♭ is ♭)
Ordinarily you either spell the whole thing out (A Flat Minor) or use the symbol ♭ (A♭ == A-Flat Major; a♭ == A-Flat Minor).
A random sampling of the discs close to hand says otherwise. None uses the flat symbol, and none is hyphenated. In fact, I'm more used to seeing hyphenation between the letter of the scale and the word "minor", when written using German notation (e.g. Bach's "h-Moll Messe", Bach's B minor Mass)
The tradition of using lowercase to mean minor has certainly died out recently, but is still observable in some older music writers' musings.
Seen this morning at the Starbuck's in the lobby: 'old fashion doughnut'.
(I'm assuming they mean 'old-fashioned'.)
Apostrophes are misplaced so often I've started wondering if they even get mentioned in school any more. 'Real Estate Investor Seek's Apprentice' is one sign I've seen. (Not to be confused with the sign advertising 'cashflowing property'!)
Faren -- Er, I do proofread Locus. My policy has been (with the support of Management -- you know Who I mean) to leave the compose/comprise thing as people write it, as well as the nauseous/nauseated thing, since the distinction doesn't seem to be made as much these days. I'm open to other arguments, though. (Proofreading has got to be the most unrewarding profession in the world -- if you do your job correctly no one notices, but spell one word wrong ...)
Back to English pronunciation -- An Englishman once laughed at me when I asked him where Tottenham Street was. "Oooh, Totnam!" he said. Much too late, I realized I should have said, "Oh, yeah -- well, how would you pronounce La Jolla, you're so smart?"
Faren Miller, I had relatives who owned the drive-in theater in Bagdad, so I heard Prescott mangled often. Other Arizona weirdness: Tucson, usually properly spoken but often typo-ed as Tuscon, which makes me think of mastodon formal wear.
One that I've seen so often that I honestly don't know which is correct is iced tea/ice tea.
I feel sure that it must be "iced tea" as it is tea which has been poured over ice and, thus, iced. And "ice tea" sounds rather like "ice wine" which really isn't it at all.
But then, it's "ice cream."
Lisa Goldstein: yeah, and they said "sare a JAY vough" when the Olympics were there, too. I heard a BBC commentary once, from Singapore, where a member of a political theatre company said "My friends are always saying 'When is the Black Maria [muh REE uh] going to come for you?'" The BBC reporter immediately explained that "The Black Maria [muh RYE uh] is the paddy wagon."
She was so arrogant she wouldn't even get it right with an exemplar right in front of her! I've found that on the BBC this is true of every language except French, which even the BBC attempts to pronounce correctly.
Ulrika's mention of "people offering 'rod iron furniture'" reminded me of a business my then-girlfriend and I passed every so often, which made and sold "rot iron".
I've never heard paddywagons called the 'Black Ma-REE-a', only the 'Black Ma-RYE-a'. (I don't know why the pronunciation in this case is different. The handy dictionary also gives only this pronunciation, with no explanation. My compact OED is in a box, about thirty miles from where I'm sitting, or I'd check it also.)
P J Evans: "Apostrophes are misplaced so often I've started wondering if they even get mentioned in school any more"
To say nothing of all the people who believe that quotation marks are used for emphasis: 'For sale: "new" washer' (temporarily using British quoting conventions).
Hyphens get their share of abuse, too, with people inserting them at whim these days. (As best I can tell, the current misuse began with computer types not understanding the difference between the act, "to back up a disk", and the result, "a tape back-up". The current rule seems to be, "when in doubt, insert a hyphen".)
But punctuation abuse probably deserves its own thread.
P J Evans -- I've never heard paddywagons called the 'Black Ma-REE-a', only the 'Black Ma-RYE-a'. (I don't know why the pronunciation in this case is different. The handy dictionary also gives only this pronunciation, with no explanation. My compact OED is in a box, about thirty miles from where I'm sitting, or I'd check it also.)
Although the definition is in the OED supplement, the pronunciation doesn't get mentioned. (And how embarrassing--I almost had to dig out the magnifying glass. Must be officially old.) Further checking reveals that Partridge also ignores pronunciation.
Both Merriam-Webster Online (http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/Black+Maria) and Free Dictionary (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Black+Maria) give a long "i".
Linkmeister: or a gathering of mastodon fans.
Todd Rundgren (Is he a linguistic authority? I don't know, but he did write a song about onomatopoeia, which must count for something.) pronounces it "Black Ma-RYE-a" in his song "Black Maria."
Still, the person pronounced it according to local custom, and it ought to have been pronounced the way she said it (her being a native of Singapore, and the BBC reporter NOT being one).
And I've seen the term before and (I guess) always assumed it used a correct pronunciation of 'Maria'. The one with an EYE in the middle is spelled Mariah as far as I'm concerned.
And I scoff at Webster! (I don't know from Free Dictionary.) I'll see what American Heritage says when I get home (probably the same thing it says now, but I can't check it yet).
Tucson is pronounced TOO-sahn. Their local annual SF convention is called TusCon.
Greg London, "thirty yacht six" is a thing of beauty and wonder.
Faren, Xopher: I've already published my rants about split infinitives, terminal prepositions, etc., in "On Copyediting." Xopher, the phrase you were trying to remember was "The language Latin that same thing as English not is," and I believe it's mine.
As I understand it, "Black Maria" (when used in the context cited) *is* correctly pronounced "Ma-RYE-a", but then I grew up listening to the BBC.
On Scraps' point about distinctions sometimes having never existed and therefore relying on (often unnamed) authorities: well yes, but the "language is evolving" argument depends just as much on the authority of the ordinary language users. Some may prefer that, and I guess they (we?) will win in the end, but that's no reason not to try to affect the outcome. I don't like to ground my argument in historical usages, or you get into trouble; I'd prefer to ground it in whether or not a useful distinction is being made (as with flout/flaunt) or not (as with font/fount). Ambiguity (for modern readers) is bad, historically justified or otherwise. Of course, if nobody understands the distinction made, then perhaps it does have to be abandoned. But I still think it's a shame. And values for "nobody" in that sentence may vary.
Magdalen
Magdalene (which is which?)
Magdalene is at Cambridge and Magdalen Oxford, although they are pronounced the same way (as "Maudlin"). And the old pronunciation of "Holborn" is being phased out, as far as I can tell, seeing as everyone looks at me strangely when I use it in London. But I will continue to laugh, entirely unfairly, at people who mispronounce Edinburgh or Tottenham, and also La Jolla. But how about the famous Towcester races?
English teachers, formally enthusiastic about their subject
Reminds me of Charles Windsor, the artist formally known as Prince.
Sarah S lamented:
One that I've seen so often that I honestly don't know which is correct is iced tea/ice tea.
"Iced tea" is correct: tea which has been "iced", or (in this case) been combined with ice (either by adding the ice or pouring the tea over the ice). A near-equivalent would be "spiced wine", wine which has had spices added to it.
(Why, then, is it "ice water"? I'd guess that has a different derivation: "ice water" would originally be the water coming off melting ice, and, by extension, any water of the same temperature, usually achieved by adding ice to water. Or perhaps it should be "iced water", and lost the "d" rather longer ago than "ice tea". Had I an OED handy, I'd check.)
But then, it's "ice cream."
The way one phrase comes into being doesn't necessarily tell you anything about how a seemingly-equivalent phrase came into being. "Iced tea" is still liquid; "ice cream" is solid (in the same way that clay is solid), and you don't have separate "ice" and "cream" parts, as you do with "iced tea". Hence, it is cream that is ice, rather than cream that has been iced.
enclosed is a synapse plus three chapters
Oh, my head...
Xopher:
Not that this counts as any sort of authority, but there is a song (apparently from a Lerner and Lowe musical Paint Your Wagon) called "They Call the Wind Maria", in which Maria is pronounced with the RYE middle, to rhyme with "Fire".
So the "dual" pronounciation goes back at least that far.
I have no idea if this (directly) relates, but I recall from several years back an article about peoples' names in a parenting magazine that talked about gender shifts, and that very often, a name would initially have a different pronounciation when it shifted genders -- even if the spelling didn't change -- and that once a name shifted from being used for males to also applying to females, very often its use for males would decline or cease altogether. It gave several examples, none of which (of course) I specifically remember.
But maybe this is related ...
... Or, maybe not.
Pedantic Peasant
Like Evelyn? I believe that's pronounced EEV-lin for men, and EV-e-lin for women.
Pedantic Peasant - yes, and it's spelled both ways by various people. Lerner and Lowe apparently were in the WRONG camp, because the sheet music spells it that way. Look here for a website that spells it "right" even though they show a picture of the sheet music with it "wrong"!
Paint Your Wagon was a sucky show anyway.
OK, OK. Shet mah mouf.
Lerner and Loewe, please. Yes, "Maria" the name has historically been pronounced both ways, and I believe the "h" on the end has been added to distinguish the two of them. "Black Maria" seems to go back to an 1830s racehorse in New York - certainly the term for a prison van can be cited from 1836 - so the question is how "Maria" might have been pronounced back then. Anyone know?
(When I said "certainly" then, I meant "according to the first relevant citation I could find on Google", but that would have taken too long.)
I had a neighbor once tell me, in reference to some long-since-forgotten incident, that she "was fiberglasted".
Suzanne - that happened to me once. It itched for weeks, it was awful. And I wore gloves working with insulation from then on.
Re black ma-RYE-ah, it's the British title of this book. The UK edition does not have the handy pronunciation guide in the first paragraph. You are expected to know. When I first read the book, I didn't know. I've compared notes with a couple of other readers, and they didn't know either.
I'm not a big fan of character name pronunciation guides in general, and it doesn't matter a jot to me how anyone pronounces "Hermione". But letting the evil Mrs Laker share her name with the heroine of West Side Story would send out all the wrong signals.
Great thread.
In her excellent "Eats, Shoots, & Leaves", Lynne Truss found that "fine tooth-comb" was correct in 19th century literature.
Apparently there was in fact something called a "tooth-comb".
But letting the evil Mrs Laker share her name with the heroine of West Side Story would send out all the wrong signals.
*jaw drops* Oh, but you're kidding, of course. No one could be that silly really. The Karate Kid went through the Stargate? That girl in The Blair Witch Project deserved what she got, after all she was SO MEAN in high school...
A student wrote on a law school exam that a regulation "wouldn't pass constitutional mustard" (as opposed to constitutional muster, which is far less stringent).
J Austin: He does the same with hearing, though. The syllables are right, the number of words is right, but it comes out, "Hey, is this a Zubic Micronium?"
Has your husband had any brain injuries? This is a classic type of aphasia.
Adam S, I was 12 when I hit the "know more words than I can pronounce" hurdle.
Passing constitutional mustard is an extremely painful symptom of certain diseases and should not be dismissed lightly.
Marilee,
No brain injuries of which I'm aware. The thing with the Cubic Zirconium is just him not really paying attention, as far as we can discover. He gets the cadence, and a fair number of the defining letters, but the actual pronunciation isn't particularly important to him. If I get pissy, and make him say something right, then he has it, and just says it wrong to irritate me.
It's the same first-letter-measure-the-word thing with books. He's an avid reader, but can read the same book over and over. I do that too, with my favorites, but with him, it truly is different each time, because the first time, he doesn't actually read all the words.
With my first manuscript--
"Hey, you should mention this earlier."
"I mentioned it three times in the first chapter. You're fired."
and just says it wrong to irritate me.
ObBloomCounty:
Pear Pimples for Hairy Fishnuts!
joann: The writing centre at my college is staffed by students some of whom are little better than the ones going to them.
The writing centre at my college is staffed by students some of whom are little better than the ones going to them.
And, I would add, while quite good at correcting grammatical errors, these centres often have a problem with student essays which are strictly grammatical but don't say anything. Actually, that's a problem with a lot of professors, too.
Lisa Goldstein: What if one can pronounce both 'La Jolla' and 'Tottenham' in the correct local manner (your humble and ob't servant having grown up near one and gone to grad school in the other).
Owlmirror,
I was thinking Hairy Fishnuts all day yesterday, but couldn't remember the source. Two stuffed Opus--er, Opera, I guess--are sitting right in front of me.
Xopher: Oh, but sometimes, when it's not squicky, it's fun. Take Curious George Bush.
"Taking the United states as a hole,"
(from a high school history paper)
I've been wondering whether our esteemed hosts ever receive submissions addressed to "Tore Books."
I suppose that would be a name bestowed on someone who liked to rip up telephone directories.
(Ducking)
Ooh! I just remember this one, from a story in a Star Trek fanzine circa 1974. The reference is to Captain Kirk:
"But Captian is in human."
I'm fairly certain the writer was not refering to a body swap, nor to Kirk's latest girlfriend.
I facepalm. I live in Gloucestershire, how could I forget that and the other -cesters as an example of simplified English pronunciation? (Glostershuh)
BTW, how is La Jolla pronounced?
Now, I just saw this over at Pharyngula: "...some sodden militaristic crusade". Which gave me pause, as I would have said "...some sodding military crusade".
But on second thoughts PZ probably did mean "wet" (possibly in the sense of drunk) and wasn't trying to cuss.
It's pronounced "La Hoya", the way a Spanish person would say it. Actually, from the More Information Than You Really Wanted Department, the correct spelling is La Joya ("the jewel") -- the explanation I was given is that it was named Very Long Ago and spelling wasn't consistent back then.
Xopher -- I once heard an Englishman say something that sounded like "MAY-co", which, it turns out, was his pronunciation of "macho".
Teresa -- You gave me a copy of "On Copyediting" many years ago at some convention or other -- I still have it and treasure it, not least because you said it was okay to end a sentence with a preposition.
Fragano Ledgister -- I abase myself in the face of your superior pronunciation skills. And I also realized since I last posted that it might be Tottenham Road, not Tottenham Street. Which shows (if you haven't guessed already) that I know next to nothing about London geography. So I'll just tiptoe away quietly, and post again when I'm not so tired.
A student wrote on a law school exam that a regulation "wouldn't pass constitutional mustard" (as opposed to constitutional muster, which is far less stringent).
It wouldn't quite cut the muster, asyermightsay.
A friend recently returned from Iraq, where (he told us jokingly in a hurriedly-typed email) his unit has become known as "The Terror of the Dessert". It was about ten minutes before someone pointed out that obviously they were not men to be trifled with.
You can't pass up lines like that.
Lisa Goldstein: It might even be Tottenham Court Road....
Lisa -- after I moved to AZ I continued to do Locus proofreading for a while, and believe me you have my sympathies! I'm probably too twitchy about "comprised of," but some long-ago English class produced a lasting aversion -- probably due to the prof's defining "comprise" as something like "embrace". Bad as my memory is, some things do stick! And the May issue has so much material crammed in, I can see how a typo or two might slip by. (Pity about the bad continuation page # on one interview, but them's the breaks!) It reminds me of cleaning the catbox -- there's always one extra piece of crap to be found (or not) at the very last minute.
Moving on.... Local pronunciation is a fascinating thing. My husband lost his Mainish accent long ago, but his Mom still sounds just like Flo the diner lady in "Non Sequitur".
Just to confuse you even more on Tucson, the IATA code is TUS.
So I accidentally taught a travel agent to misspell Tucson. Back before the Internet (1982 or so) I booked round-trip tickets from Harrisburg to Tucson. The travel agent duly typed up the itinerary but put down TUC as the airport code.
I pointed out that Tucson's airport code is TUS, not TUC, and when the tickets were issued the new itinerary had TUS as the airport code, and yet another promo for Tucson's SF convention.
Now that we have the Internet, I looked up TUC: Benjamin Matienzo Airport in Tucuman, Argentina.
Patrick Connor: A friend of mine was in Mexico, and on reading a brochure at his hotel decided on a whim to visit Oaxaca. However, not speaking Spanish, he pronounced it 'Ox-ah-ca'. He very nearly found himself booked on a flight to Osaka.
A friend recently returned from Iraq, where (he told us jokingly in a hurriedly-typed email) his unit has become known as "The Terror of the Dessert". It was about ten minutes before someone pointed out that obviously they were not men to be trifled with.
Did he think you were pudding him down?
I see "wholistic approach" all over the place lately.
When I was in travel agent school in the 1980s, one of the assignments was to mock-book an itinerary from Tucson (TUS) to Honolulu. One person's result routed the person through Denver (DEN) instead of LAX or SFO. We thought that was odd until we noticed that she'd booked the person to Helena, Montana (HLN) instead of Honolulu (HNL).
Sad to say, Worldwide Travel once caught a real travel agent making a similar error.
Karen
British place names:
Berwick upon Tweed, on the border between England and Scotland, is pronounced "Berrik".
Lerwick, the main town on the island of Shetland, is pronounced "Lerwick".
I believe it's a piece of convergent linguistic evolution.
- o0o -
dreadful phrase:
Tenderhooks. Gets me every time I see it.
Faren -- The interview is a whole 'nother thing -- I do those from manuscript pages because they have to go in early. And now it sounds as if I'm making excuses, so I won't post about this again -- no, not even to say which reviewer wrote about "Earth under the alien yolk."
Fragano Ledgister -- Arggggg!
A whole 'nother thing. That's one of those folk-etymological changes of the kind that gave us 'an apron' (from earlier 'a napron').
'Another' is just a shorthand way of writing 'an other'. If there's a word in the middle, the sandhi-n is not there, so 'a ____ other'. But long ago someone decided that the phrase was actually 'a nother' and now we have things like 'a whole nother'—and probably some people who think that's different from 'a whole other'!
No slam on you, Lisa. It's a long tradition at this point. As well chide you for saying 'apron'!
Xopher, is "napron" related to "napkin?"
Karen Funk Blocher -- When I was in travel agent school in the 1980s, one of the assignments was to mock-book an itinerary from Tucson (TUS) to Honolulu. One person's result routed the person through Denver (DEN) instead of LAX or SFO. We thought that was odd until we noticed that she'd booked the person to Helena, Montana (HLN) instead of Honolulu (HNL).
When I was working in San Jose CA (also in the 80s) we lived in terror that somebody doing travel arrangements would suffer a brain seizure and type the obvious SJO instead of SJC. Who needs to go to Costa Rica?
From the local paper here: "[T]hey've got another thing coming."
--Mary Aileen
Lisa Goldstein: If ever I'm in La Jolla in the near future, I'll buy you a drink at the Carlos Murphy's at UTC.
Joann says -
When I was working in San Jose CA (also in the 80s) we lived in terror that somebody doing travel arrangements would suffer a brain seizure and type the obvious SJO instead of SJC. Who needs to go to Costa Rica?
Well, I have been known to book people to Costa Rica in my travel agent days, but only if that's where they needed to go.
Toward the end of my travel agency training, I spent a day at an agency, supposedly observing. The person I was supposed to meet with showed up two hours later, met with me for 15 minutes and left again. He said, "I don't care if you're the class valedictorian [which I was]. You can't be a travel agent fresh out of school, book a trip to La Paz, Bolivia and not screw it up."
Of course I went back to school, booked an itinerary to La Paz, Bolivia (as opposed to La Paz, Mexico), made it autoprice, and went home, satisfied. So there!
Lori: Yes. They're both diminutives, oddly enough, of an Old French word for 'tablecloth'. Which is derived from Latin 'mappa', which means 'napkin'. They're both related to 'map', too.
Joann: When I was working in San Jose CA (also in the 80s) we lived in terror that somebody doing travel arrangements would suffer a brain seizure and type the obvious SJO instead of SJC.
When I was going to grad school in Rochester, NY (ROC) there were the invitable stories of international students arriving in Rochester, MN (RST) looking for the University of Rochester and facing a potentially expensive taxi ride.
Thankfully ROC is more intuitive than RST for Rochester.
probably due to the prof's defining "comprise" as something like "embrace"
The grave is fine on your demise
But don't expect to decomprise.
I see them, and they just rattle around in my head . . .
Some I see a lot in which a bit of typography reverses the meaning:
My application was excepted
I was apart of the group
I recently learned that there was a racist group called the Klux Klutz Klan. And I thought those books were innocent fun.
In my part of Appalachia, born-and-bred residents use "I don't care" the way the rest of the English-speaking world uses "I don't mind." One is no more intrinsically logical than the other, but it creates misunderstanding. I heard of a company that moved headquarters from far away; they turned away job applicants for a year before realizing that "I don't care at all to do that" conveys willingness.
Perhaps this is related; it goes in the "kids these days" file anyway: the dreadful absence of syntax in some people's email. Received from a student:
[Name] here would you check my website out I got it working I think it all I can do I have no more time I hope it what you want I tried I thought it was pretty hard but I got something up one link works takes you rite a site and so does the [initials of professional organization, in lower case, natch] one once again thanks for all you have done for me over the semester.
This is a guy who writes perfectly well on a word processor. But writing in email is like a stream-of-consciousness yell into a dark tunnel . . . maybe some message will come out at the other end.
Oh, and "pneumonic device" or "pneumatic device" . . . to help with memory. I can't spell mnemonic by heart, so I understand this one. But it makes me think of a backhoe.
Oh, by the by, I'm pleased that you culled from my post, but "quaffed" was an eggcorn database one: I was just referencing it.
Re: mid-evil, I frequently see that same one all run together as midevil, or midivel, or medevil. It's pernicious on online fantasy games.
I've seen "serous problem" in a context not referring to serums of any sort. Typo, I'm sure, but funny.
I particularly liked one I came across in the free city paper this morning: "it was a grizzly crime."
Exit, pursued by a...
Oh, and "quite" and "quiet" are homophones here . . . both pronounced "quaat," both ALWAYS spelled "quite."
I know very well that language is always changing, and most of this doesn't matter to most people . . . so, thanks for sharing this gift/curse of noticing what's actually on the page, because so few people I know personally care.
I also know very well that I'm the only one left in this thread.
I'm not! Hi, folks. I'm going to sleep now.
Re: language change, are we at the point in history when "every day" disappears completely, and "everyday" is both an adjective and a noun phrase? This is one of those things that Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little wrote about above; it creates ambiguity where there used to be a clear distinction.
The gift/curse is not just that this drives me nuts, it's that most people can't even see a difference.
rm: This is a guy who writes perfectly well on a word processor. But writing in email is like a stream-of-consciousness yell into a dark tunnel . . . maybe some message will come out at the other end.
I recall seeing stuff in the press recently about a study (my search-fu is weak, can't find documentation) that indicated that a certain amount of misspellings and other errors is a status marker in email, and appears in communication from the more powerful to the less.
I've taken to leaving a typo or two (but not introducing any) in my emails, and it seems to help in getting people to do what I want them to.
A late entry, from a technical discussion board:
"I complete agree with understanding how TCP works and why before implementing your own UDP or even IP based protocol (I'm liking SCTP more & more), but using TCP does not solve the problem, it exuberates it!"
As with many of the other malapropisms, it's oddly correct in its own way.
Aha! Finally found one:
"Boil a cup of rice and through in some saffron."
Oooh...
Here's a sheerly awful one I just picked up on the Evil Editor: A character in one of the bad example query letters "was privy to the kingdom’s greatest secrets and sword to protect them."
rm, you're not the only one in the thread. I don't think I've often seen "everyday" as a noun, so it may have been regionally adapted. I think there are also a few contexts where the usage is unclear. "You don't do those things every day (everyday)" could be a noun usage, or it could mean "You don't do those things in an everyday context," and just be ungrammatical.
Larry Brennan: that's fascinating, and if you do stumble across a link to the study, I'd like to see it. Because I would have guessed the other way around, but I can see a point for it, I suppose, in context of the tradition of being short with one's "lessers" and not bothering to explain oneself.
I would have guessed the other way around because I grew up talking in ten-thousand-dollar words, and learned to adapt to more casual speech styles later, mostly in connection with entering the "lower-middle-class freak" category from the "upper-middle-class academic kid" one.
In this morning's Grauniad, reference was made to Ealing as a "bellweather" borough. If I were the writer I'd be rather sheepish. (What would bell weather be, I wonder? Windy enough to ring changes, perhaps.)
A headline local paper had a typo the other night that I see all too often: "solider" (as in "solider killed in Iraq").
Since one of the local Catholic parish schools closed its doors, we no longer seem to get "Scared" as in "Scared Heart." Unfortunately, "solider" seems to have replaced it.
Two that I didn't see here (doesn't mean they aren't):
-- Seeing his sister naked was a peek experience.
-- Mrs. Flintlock is a teatotaller. (i.e. someone who totally drinks tea)
I got a great one in an e-mail today:
"Bubble Bees fly and they are not aerodynamically
equipped to do it."
Steve Taylor -- "I complete agree with understanding how TCP works and why before implementing your own UDP or even IP based protocol (I'm liking SCTP more & more), but using TCP does not solve the problem, it exuberates it!
"As with many of the other malapropisms, it's oddly correct in its own way.
Ditto the experience I had with a doctor some years back who said, "Don't scratch it, you'll only excoriate the problem!"
Oh, remembered another one -- I once heard a man say he had a "photogenic memory." One that only remembered pretty things, I guess.
Almost forgot one of my favorites:
"You know why they don't have those X-ray machines in shoe stores any more? Because they were bad for you -- the X-rays would shine up on your gentile organs."
"Bubble Bees fly and they are not aerodynamically
equipped to do it."
Speaking of which, I believe that this is the definitive explanation of the Flight of the Bumblebee.
Although that explains nothing about the flight (float?) of the bubble bee.
Re: "You've got another thing coming". I swear that is how I heard and read the phrase when I was growing up in the '60s and '70s, with perhaps an occasional "think", which sounded to my ear like a clever misappropriation.
It wasn't until I read another editor ranting about it (a personal bete noire of his) in a forum just a few years ago that I had the awful truth. Well, I say "awful", but "think" still sounds wrong to me.
I think I'll just never use either variant of the phrase ever again.
The full quote makes the error clearer: "If they think they're going to force this down our throats, they've got another thing coming."
--Mary Aileen
non-serious description: 'pornographic memory' (meaning 'obscenely good memory')
I've been seeing a lot of use of 'moral' for 'morale' lately.
Just found this header on a popular advice column:
KNIT ONE, PEARL TWO
(I'll admit, I assumed that was correct for years.)
ERs and Urgent Care centers still have fluoroscopes. I get to look at my feet with them sometimes.
Even though the thread is dying down, I still can't stop myself going over the great list of phrases now collected in the main post and assigning visual imagery to them.
"He clamoured to his feet" -- you just can't stand up quietly in heavy armor.
"He had the patients of an angle" -- a scoliosis specialist.
"Post-Dramatic Stress Disorder" -- final curtain calls can be hard.
There's a Tori Amos song containing the line "alive below the waste." She's very intentional with her double meanings, though.
I recall seeing stuff in the press . . . that indicated that a certain amount of misspellings and other errors is a status marker in email, and appears in communication from the more powerful to the less.
Larry, there are some classic studies in sociolinguistics -- William Labov in the 70s, I think -- that show upper-class speakers using non-standard forms, while the upwardly-striving middle class strictly enforces "proper" speech. And over-enforces it, using "hypercorrect" forms like "whom" or "I" when it should be "who" or "me." Rich preppy slackers wear their unearned status lightly, while insecure climbers try too hard to gain approval.
So, I think something like that might go on in email. But that's not what's happening when students treat email like it's IM, even when writing to employers or professors. They just think that this medium has no formatting standards. And they have never written a physically existing letter, except for an assignment in third grade.
Nalo, "teetotally" is used here in Kentucky (a bit east of AY-thens and Ver-SALES), as in "I teetotally don't care at all to do that," meaning "I am totally willing to do that." It's not used often; it's used a little self-consciously as slightly archaic; but it still exists, while in the rest of the world "teetotaller" is the only surviving instance.
Along with "quiet/quite," I notice a very common confusion of "sale/sell." These are also homophones in much of the South. Students write things like "the story was having a sell." They do this even though J.C. Penney is constantly advertising its perpetual SALE! not only on paper, which the young folks seldom read, but on TV.
Quiet, quite; diet Sprite. I'm going to start printing flash cards. If you can spell and say one, you can with the other too. Sale, sell; male Mel. I'm starting to understand the evil temptation to teach prescriptive grammar, even though I know it doesn't work.
While writing about the "quite mouse" and the "50% off sell," they also won't get off my lawn no matter how much I yell. Kids these days.
The bell-ringing discussion on another thread reminded me of reading "wring the changes" somewhere.
Boy, I love this thread. Hey -- who turned out the lights? Hello? Hello? Is anyone still here?
I can never read these lists without having a Tex Avery-style cartoon run through my head, illustrating the literal meaning...
If I knew any English teachers, I'd suggest they collect these lists and make projects out of finding the correct phrases or terms. But I don't.
I just have to claim the 400th post in this thread.
I just had a young friend tell me he made ramen noodles with the "scolding hot water" from the faucet.
I told him scold is cold and scald is caliente.
reminds me of the history student (ok, it was me) who wrote about the
bearfooted Carmelites
they were nuns who didn't wear shoes :-)
I'm entirely too entertained by the mental image produced by:
I hadn't realized that most of the people in the security community could knit - never mind needing to spend time unraveling their disasters.
Re: JHB's post
I do know an English teacher, so I passed on the suggestion. He said:
"These are fun! I may have to use them in class..."
My almost 101-year old friend this morning was explaining that the Pima Council on Aging shouldn't take pictures of the centenarians at their annual luncheon honoring them. "They should show pictures of them when they were young, along with a biopsy of their accomplishments."
I can't blame Eva's brain for offering the word biopsy there (my brain should work so well at age 100!). Eva is a retired nurse.
And just because I couldn't resist, here's The Empirical Storm Troopers.
oh, I didn't see anyone mention using "mute" instead of the correct term "moot". I was going to bring it up earlier in the thread but thought it was a mute point.
No, Greg. It was a mute point BEFORE you brought it up (except I think someone did mention it). But I'm knitpicking.
Another one. Someone named MadTom, on Healing Iraq: "The point I was trying to make was about public (straight) sediments on the gay issues..."
Sediments. Eeesh.
oop. yep. I searched for "moot" but not "mute". grrr.
As for "sediments", maybe he was thinking of doing some mud slinging?
Xopher: When I was at high school we used 'sediment' as a deliberate substitute for 'sentiment'.
Okay, one more, from a book I proofread -- "a regiment of diet and exercise." The book was by someone who gave lectures about health, so presumably he pronounced it this way, "t" included, and no one ever corrected him.
"Okay, vegetables, march! Hey, where you going, broccoli?"
This just in from a final exam:
Many years ago, before government was formed, people had to live on their own reconnaissance.
"a regiment of diet and exercise"
Monstrous.
IIrc, "regiment" used as "regiment of diet and exercise" would have been correct in the 16th and 17th centuries.
This fails to excuse Lisa's presumably 20th century author, but it's interesting nonetheless.
John M. Ford: You're not, by any chance, channelling John Knox?
Up from the word mines:
"The problem was that was the voting ballads where unreliable and contained falsies."
I thought he was channeling Terry Pratchett...
Melissa: Obviously, Pratchett was channelling Knox who wrote A Counterblaste of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.
More from the word mines:
"Change first started coming about during the First World War when women were given jobs as nurses, bus drivers, and railway partners. This made many women’s confidence grow and change their usual habits."
From final exams:
hand's on training
safe confinds
randomality
fender binders
I won't criticise outright misspellings like "princables," because that's another topic. I like "fender binders" (more Southern homophones).
In one of my posts above, I wrote "story" when I meant "store." For all have sinned and fallen short.
'Fender binders' sounds as if the cars got stuck together.
We all make mistakes,I agree, but some mistakes are entertaining.
An officemate of my daughter's saw her neighbor's house catch fire, and told Sarah that it (the house) "went up like a cinderblock.."
Just found this description: 3-foot Ring Tale Diamondback rattlesnake
It's from Middle Earth, perhaps?
More fun from Evil Editor:
"Jallend, vampire, self-proclaimed artist, and humanities judge and jury..."
"Once I jump that hurtle..."
Humanities judge and jury?
"You are not hanging that THING in MY artshow!!!!
Oh, my. There are exceptions to every rule.
'Surviving the Eminent Holocaust' was in a script I proofread last week.
And on the topic of Marias, Shakespeare uses ma-RYE-ah as the correct pronunciation.
Sometimes people realize they may not fully understand the phrase. An undergraduate wrote on a philosophy examination, "it is like the Golden Rule:do un to others as you would have them do un to you. Is "un" a word?"
Pet peeve, and I'm pretty sure this is as much a unversal Americanism as it is wrong:
"The plane will land momentarily."
If that looks right to you, note that 'momentarily' is 'FOR a moment', not "IN a moment'.
Some of them make it into general useage when the first one is no longer understood, like "butt naked." No one says "buck naked" any more. And butt naked does make sense!
Sherwood, many of them make a kind of sense. That's why some of them are funny.
I see your point though. There is this word 'bareass', which is probably what people think 'butt naked' is euphemizing.
This is a process of linguistic change called "folk etymology."
David King: That's a good 'un!
Mike Whittaker: It does land momentarily. Then it bounces up, lands momentarily again, and finally lands for a long time (prior to taxiing to the gate). Haven't you ever ridden in a plane? [g]
Coincidentally, I ran across one of these today that I've never seen before - the "rampant dog."
So help me, this is a headline in my Yahoo Kansas City news rack....
"KU Med. Center Defends Its Brain-Dead Tests"
I did not look to see if it was that way in the KC Star today or yesterday, but it could also hae been generated from the KMBC news writers (TV).
Yikes!
Mike Whittaker, you've never heard of "touch and go"?
Back in the late 90s, I worked in the great metropolis of Morehead, KY. One spring day, straight line winds blew down trees, blew off roofs, and did assorted other damage. That week's issue of the local catbox liner reported that the governor had asked president Clinton to 'declare Morehead a federal disaster' (rather than 'disaster area'). My first thought was that, while dismal, it wasn't quite that bad.
Spotted over at Languagehat:
“My old washing machine, he’s given up the goat”
Simply lovely, as is the explanation the speaker gives for using that particular word.
Some cool stuff there. But we were doing it first!
I mentioned over there that when I was a child, I thought my mother was using a Yiddish expression when she said "Yezhuhshmaddiya." But once I found out how it's spelled, I concluded that it was not likely Yiddish. 'Jesus Maria'.
But we were doing it first!
Well, that's debatable. I think Language Log has ML beat by three years, give or take.
But I think this thread has beat everyone else for sheer size.
Some I came across when proofing (English was not her native tongue):
embroidered in battle
the girl's new outfit was electrical
he slashed cream across her new dress
I'll be waiting with baited breath for more examples.
Found another one this morning in an article on "The DaVinci Code." A preacher would like to "ring the author's neck."
An old one, spotted today on the Well:
"It's like an Alcatraz around my neck."
--Boston mayor Menino on the shortage of city parking spaces
Just saw this one: "He is not aloud to say a word."
Xopher: I see that one pretty frequently. I also see 'apart of' for 'a part of' a great deal, and grit my teeth every time.
thanks for piquing my curiosity and making me laugh until I cried
O gods. "...an outer body experience"!!!!!!!
Gag.
"succame" as past tense of succumb.
Erik...they HAD to be kidding, right? Please tell me they were kidding!
I'm gonna start using "succame."
succumb == have an orgasm from oral sex?
"Oh! Oh! I'm gonna...succumb!"
'Succame' sounds like an artificial sweetener.
Xopher: Thank goodness I wasn't drinking anything.
David King, I believe I can explain that usage:
He laughed at the joke. "Good 'un," he said.I think there's a good chance that your student thinks the saying is:
Do one to others as you would have them do one to you.
My mom frequently mangles difficult proper names (her doctor is Kapanjie, but she calls him "Kapanzik") and all sorts of words and phrases.
She says, in explanation, "Just call me Mrs. Malatrot."
Spam at 458 as I write this.
I am very late to the party, but I couldn't let this one escape notice. The writer asked his readers not to cow toe to people who recommended that Don Imus be fired.
Yet, people are forever saying that others should (or shouldn't) tow the line, instead of toeing it.
Tho' I thought it was pronounced more like cow tao (towe?), i.e. rhymes with how now brown cow. Interesting mental image, that.
My personal pet dæmon is the font/fount eggcorn, but that's mainly because of the embarrassing moment long ago when I learned about it the hard way. (That page also mentions the chomping/champing eggcorn, which I suspect is a little bit more forgivable than the already quite forgivable "font of knowledge" error. I certainly don't think reasonable people should go non-linear over the font/fount thing. It's just my little bit of irrationality.)
Just stumbled across one while glancing at a legal filing. Two apparently different people are "one in the same."
A friend wrote from Laos, describing the ongoing process of disarming unexploded ordinance remaining from the Vietnam War.
I very much dislike, "burying the lede."
Lede is a noun that means a people or race.
"Burying the lead," means burying the lead paragraph!
Thank you for letting me get that off my chest!
Here's one from a student essay on drug policy: "Many meth users become pair annoyed..."
Mike Whitaker @#432: Language Hat (or rather, his commenters) covered that use of "momentarily" while he was discussing "hopefully".
Susan @#359: "wholistic" is actually semi-correct, in that it's at least using the English cognate for the root.
Xopher: I can't reach your 9CL comic: it's too old for the free archives.
David, nearly two years later I have no idea what that was. Sorry.
Something appears to be weird after comment #267.
Actually, Lee, many old threads have been italicized. I noticed that a couple of days ago, I think.
It's fine in Mozilla. I note that the first line of 267 is italicized. Maybe someone forgot to close a tag?
Mary Aileen #470:
I note that the first line of 267 is italicized.
Like me, here, quoting you?
One I found today:
"no wonder why we are the laughing stalk of the world."
I've been seeing "per say" for per se a lot recently.
when too many NFL teams finish at 8-8 or 9-7, fans complain about "too much parody in football"
I've always liked "foisted by his own petard"
[posted from 195.234.70.194]
Term paper ghosting! Happy Halloween!
term paper spam at 476
We can't have a thread with a "spam deleted" massage as the last post.
"Leaning on windmills" for "tilting at windmills" (I wish I had saved the cite). Apparently Don Quixote isn't as well known as it was.
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