another one from a post!

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Aug 16, 2009, at 12:58 PM, 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.

i have never understood why people bridle so much at being told that
some mistake is not an eggcorn, but is some some other type of
(perfectly interesting) mistake -- as if "eggcorn" were a precious
label.

i spent some five hours this morning responding to queries about
things that might possibly be labeled as eggcorns.  i now see that
this was entirely wasted time, and i won't do it again.  i should have
followed up up on my earlier posting about proposing to go away from
this newsgroup, following in the footsteps of dennis preston, roger
shuy, and barry popik (three very different personalities, by the
way).  i will now unsubscribe.

i never proposed to be the "eggcorn approval board", whatever that
would mean.  i was trying to figure out what was going on in
particular cases, and observing that there were many different things
(as i have observed over the last thirty years).

arnold

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