"as one in the same"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I've seen "one in the same" on many student papers. It may be the dominant form of the phrase today.

"Doggy dog world" has been circulating on lists of "what freshmen write" for at least twenty years, but I've never encountered it in nature.  A Google search suggests that it may be chiefly, though not utterly, an urban legend.  I've never seen or heard "take it for granite" either, except on those lists. (Just my personal experience, folks.)

The "doggy-dog" search reminded me of "for all intensive purposes," which I am indeed familiar with.

The amusing 1991 film, "Bernard and the Genie," contains the quotable line, "He needs to learn that this is a dog-stab-dog-in-the-back-and-then-eat-dog world!"

JL


JL
Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: "as one in the same"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 20:44:57 -0500, crg wrote:

>More often, I see misuses/abuses of commonly used clichés:
>
>This error was posted by the local news this evening:
>
>"The messages focused on asbestos in the school and his termination --
>issues that he sees as one in the same, according to the sheriff's office."
>
>Also "crown and glory" and "doggy dog world."
>
>Are these sorts of changes going on in other parts of the US or just around
>Baltimore?

No, there's nothing localized about any of those formations, which are
called "eggcorns" round these parts (see ).
I noted "one in the same" in a thread last December:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0412B&L=ads-l&P=17910

Larry Horn listed several other in/and/-in'/-en reanalyses in that thread
and in his recent "Spitten Image" paper in _American Speech_:

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_speech/v079/79.1horn.html

"Crown and glory" is a good one-- hadn't come across that before.

"Doggy dog world" has been mentioned by a few contributors to the Eggcorn
Database, though there's no entry for it yet:

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/contribute/#comment-55
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/contribute/#comment-250
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/contribute/#comment-341


--Ben Zimmer


---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Better first dates. More second dates. Yahoo! Personals