Exasperated for exacerbated

[Laurence Horn]

On Sep 3, 2014, at 6:19 AM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:

> On Sep 2, 2014, at 8:46 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM> wrote:
> 
>> I dont see this in the Eggcorn database.
>> 
>> Delta Flight Rerouted After Passengers Fight Over Legroom by ABC News =
>> (https://gma.yahoo.com/delta-flight-routed-due-passenger-disruption-061107=
>> 123--abc-news-topstories.html):
>> 
>> "The flight attendant came over, and that just exasperated what was =
>> going on, and then [the complaining passenger] demanded that the flight =
>> land," a fellow passenger said later.
> 
> not in the ecdb, but discussed several times in the eggcorn forum, where the eggcornistas treat it as a simple classical malapropism, not as an eggcorn (there is no reanalysis in favor of greater semantic transparency).
> 
True on the face of it, but it could perhaps be argued that if you don't know the word "exacerbate", the "correct" version would be entirely opaque, and if you do know "exasperate" (which is, after all, considerably more common, especially in participial adjective form) in its standard use, the meaning here (= 'exacerbate' as in the context above) *could* be seen as a kind of extension--the flight attendant's joining the fray made everyone feel even more exasperated.  So if not yielding a huge amount of transparency, it might still be *more* transparent than a totally unfamiliar word for the speaker.

LH

LH

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