eggcorn

[Rex W. Stocklin]

At 11:16 PM -0700 5/16/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

>Rex, Pres. Eisenhower always said "nucular," and he was always
>ridiculed for it.  But historians think he made a decent Prez.  God
>knows what Lincoln and Jackson sounded like.

A president's record and accomplishments thankfully are not a
function of their phonetics (unless it gets in the way of
particularly tricky diplomacy, say, insulting an Emir by maligning
his daughter's name) but what if a chief exec were incompetent both
of tongue and of brain. Imagine a world like that. It would suck.

>One reason we highly-trained professionals stress that eggcorns and
>other, er, innovations "just are" is that there isn't a God-damned
>thing we can do about them.  If you doubt me, get people to quit
>using "ain't."

Wouldn't that be "there ain't a God-damned thing we can do about
them"? ;-) As I understand it, most grammarians widely accept "Ain't"
now, as they do prepositional sentence caps. As well as split
infinitives. But I have yet to read or hear any groundswell take on
acceptance of just any malaprop being accepted because of widespread
misuse. Surely there must be some sort of litmus. But I guess
language IS an art and not a science, so.... As one who falls fairly
midway betwixt the prescriptivist and the descriptivist mindsets, I
am able to cope with a great deal of evolution of the mother tongue,
but not all.

Honk if you love road rage,
Lexy
Fishers, IN