another one from a post!

[Chris Waigl]

On 16 Aug 2009, at 20:58, David A. Daniel wrote:

> And, while I am at it, and in an anti-establishment mood and,
> further, in a
> mood to communicate such anti-establishmentarianism, I shall add the
> following: If eggcorn has to go through 37 filters, checks,
> verifications
> and, finally, the eggcorn approval board, which appears to be
> composed of
> one member, then, screw it, eggcorn is probably not really a viable
> lexical
> category.


Well, I can't say I'm making all that much sense out of your statement
above. There are a few academic linguists interested in eggcorns.
There are also a good number of members of other language-related
professions, many but not all of whom with linguistic training, as
well as quite a few amateurs. Arnold Zwicky has written several times
on how they differ from other phenomena, and he folks on the Eggcorn
Forum (http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum) seem to like debating
laundry lists of criteria, such as what to think of a substitution of
a word for another when they essentially share an etymology.

Demarkation debates are to a degree a necessity, but can turn sterile.
Whether or not "eggcorn" is a viable lexical category is best left to
those who find a use for it, or not. No one forces you to take
position for or against them. I was slightly surprised to find, by
pure chance, a session on eggcorns on the program of what looks to me
like a perfectly serious academic conference (http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=CALC-09
), and conclude from that that there are people out there who do find
the category useful.

There is no eggcorn approval board, and personally, I'd very much like
to spend more of my time collating and thinking about them, but not
being a member of any sort of linguistic establishment myself, my own
powers are limited.

Chris Waigl

--
Chris Waigl -- http://chryss.eu -- http://eggcorns.lascribe.net
twitter: chrys -- friendfeed: chryss

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