Eggcorn: momento

Benjamin Barrett gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM
Sun Oct 12 01:53:18 UTC 2008


On Oct 11, 2008, at 6:28 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Eggcorn: momento
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 5:48 PM -0700 10/11/08, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>> Momento itself gets 322 million supposed hits, a lot of which are
>> doubtless for the movie. It's "corporate momentos" (the item I
>> happened to be looking up) that gets 90. BB
>
> Perhaps worth noting that the movie (and quite a movie it was) is
> "Memento".  Most of the albums, bands, etc. with this name use the
> traditional spelling as well.  On the other hand, there is an album
> by a Portuguese musician named Pedro Abrunhosa ("known for always
> wearing sunglasses in public") which is in fact "Momento".  But I
> assume this is like the Italian "(uno) momento", corresponding to
> 'moment', not 'memento'.  In fact, I wonder how many of the (now)
> 281,000,000 hits actually correspond to the Romance language terms
> for 'moment' rather than respellings of "memento".
>

I'll be darned. Thank you for the correction. I cited the movie
because the first Googit for "momento" is the movie, though the
spelling is "Memento." BB

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