[Ads-l] "running the gambit" in the wild

[Laurence Horn]

> On Nov 9, 2015, at 1:29 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 11:21 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>> 
>> Yes, _run the gambit_ is already in the eggcorn database at
>> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__eggcorns.lascribe.net_english_174_gambit_&d=AwIBaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=iZkPcaIzEMJVm2RERLYDdSzP4kDWVFNkp5S9ijAF7sI&s=z9OodMDWxHDujc5dL5q0ENKcBC2ZOHomie9r1ygC-k4&e= .  But none of the cites
>> Chris assembles there are for edited (one hopes) prose in an actual
>> book.  There's one such in Harlan Coben's _Play Dead_ (2010), Penguin
>> Books:
>> 
>> "But this was merely her mother's latest in a long series of Thursday
>> night attempts at female bonding, running the gambit from bridge games
>> to sexual-awareness encounter groups."
> 
> 'Twas I, not Chris, who put together that particular ECDB entry.

Ah, sorry for the faulty presupposition, Ben.  Thanks to both of you for all the work that went (and continues to go) into the ECDB, and thanks on this occasion also to Scott Brick, the reader of the audiobook of _Play Dead_ for faithfully rendering Harlan Coben's original rather than "correcting" it to _gamut_.

LH

> As
> with many other entries I assembled in the early days of the database,
> I focused on college publications for citations (easily found by
> Googling on the .edu domain), since the prose in such sources tends to
> be *somewhat* edited and thus more interesting for eggcorn-hunting
> (from my perspective) than random blogs and forums. Even better when
> eggcorns appear in carefully edited printed sources, as with Larry's
> example.
> 
> --Ben
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.americandialect.org&d=AwIBaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=iZkPcaIzEMJVm2RERLYDdSzP4kDWVFNkp5S9ijAF7sI&s=nNdTKuozv0mGu4kPVqUbCtniC3o3r0CLm8k9z3q7GQw&e= 

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