[Ads-l] "out way" for "outweigh"

Dan Goncharoff thegonch at GMAIL.COM
Thu Jul 9 01:09:14 UTC 2015


Do we have any idea how many eggcorns today are generated by speech-to-text
programs? I imagine lots of educated users who can't be bothered to fix
errors on their phones or tablets.
 On Jul 8, 2015 9:05 PM, "Ben Zimmer" <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "out way" for "outweigh"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 8:33 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 8:25 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
> >>
> >> On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 7:45 PM, Geoffrey Nunberg wrote:
> >>>
> >>> From a comment on an article at Atlantic.com
> >>>
> >>>> Emotion and logic are not of equal value. Does not science and the
> >>>> collective efforts of humanity qualify as a higher form of discourse?
> >>>> The needs of the many out way the feelings of a few.
> >>>
> >>> I figured this must be a one off, but Google returns 400+ actual hits
> >>> for "out way the," the vast majority reanalyses of "outweigh."
> >>> [...]
> >>> It doesn't seem to be in the eggcorn database.
> >>
> >> No, but we do have "way anchor," "anchors away," and "way in (on)":
> >>
> >> http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/58/way/
> >>
> >> And in the other direction, "fall by the weigh side," "weigh-lay," and
> >> "weigh station":
> >>
> >> http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/478/weigh/
> >
> > I especially like the fact that all three of the cites for "weigh
> station"
> > at the ecdb involve colleges and students (as opposed to trucks
> > and truckers).  As we used to say, HEAVVV-EEEE.
>
> I think that's just because one of my strategies for finding good
> eggcorn citations back in the day was to restrict my Googling to .edu
> sites, which turned up student newspapers and other campus
> publications. I could've relied on forum posts (including trucker
> forums!), but I was more interested in edited prose, where the
> eggcorns are more notable.
>
> --bgz
>
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