"---- choice"

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Mar 28, 2009, at 7:10 AM, Charlie Doyle wrote:

> Last night on MSNBC Chris Matthews referred to President Obama's
> approach to the Afghanistan situation as a "Hobbesian choice."  A
> slip of the tongue? A malapropism? Or was he suggesting that life in
> that beleaguered realm will always be nasty, brutish, and short? Or
> did he really mean not a "Hobson's choice" but rather (as an old
> idiom has it) a "choice of evils"?

longish entry on the ecdb here:
   http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/593/hobbesian/
with references to discussions on the STUMPERS list, on ADS-L, and on
Language Log.

arnold

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org