"feint praise"--eggcorn?

[Victor Steinbok]

There is also, of course, the "feigned praise", where the eggcorning
part is more transparent. Although Google puts a bunch of discussions of
the confusion at the top of the search, there are plenty of actual examples.

http://goo.gl/llE8G
Glenn Beck Damns Frances Fox Pivens with Feigned Praise (Norman Costa)
> As one may damn with feigned praise, Glenn Beck will incite with
> feigned restraint.

http://goo.gl/fhn73
Annals of academic putdowns: The 'feigned praise' edition

And we get all three in one:

http://goo.gl/871c3
> A pedant recently contacted me to take issue with my use of “feint
> praise” in the title of a previous post. My correspondent insisted on
> “faint praise”. Some googling revealed that both are in widespread
> use. I suspect that both are actually a corruption of “feigned
> praise”, which would seem to make the most sense. I’m not alone, it seems.

The author then quotes a Canadian professor (not sure of what) John L.
Lepage:

> How long have we been killing, burying, and disinterring our
> metaphors? A long time. … I was disconcerted recently to discover that
> many otherwise well-informed people believe the expression is /to damn
> with faint praise./ "It doesn't make as much sense as /feigned
> praise,"/ I said to one such person. Never one to be caught off guard,
> he cited the prologue to Wycherly’s /The Plain Dealer/ and Pope's
> /Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot/ (line 201); he gave faint praise to my
> preference for /feigned:/ it is better, he said. It is better
> precisely because the adjective /feigned/ so readily combines with
> nouns to imply disingenuousness. To my relief, many others have
> feigned to praise in print, at least since the eighteenth century. The
> example is useful, for it illustrates how accessible to editorial
> change the language is. The close proximity in sound and meaning (and
> indeed in origin) of the words /feigned, feint,/ and /faint/ makes
> them prime candidates for substitution. The language is rich with
> words and expressions that have evolved subtly beyond their origins. I
> suppose we will have to grant that the disinterred metaphor is as
> native to the language as etymology.

This is pretty much in line with the citation that GOT dug up. The
analysis for "feint" and "feigned" is nearly identical.

VS-)


On 7/14/2012 10:15 AM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
> On Jul 14, 2012, at 4:45 AM, Stephen Goranson wrote:
>>  From "faint praise"?
>> Apparently not in the eggcorn database. GB gives "about 277 results."
>> "Rowan, who received his DPhil a few years before me (in the area then normally called „patristics‰) when he was at Wadham and I was at Keble, have only one thing in common: we wrote poetry.  His is good and mine is bad.  That is not a plea for mercy and feint praise;
> not in ecdb or mentioned in the Eggcorn Forum.  either no one had come across examples, or people (quite reasonably) dismissed it as a simple spelling confusion and not anything eggcornish (what semantics would _feint_ contribute to the expression?).
>
> arnold

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