[Lexicog] unlex-entries

[David Tuggy]

A suprising number of these kinds of errors can be viewed as having an
origin in inadvertent blends, often malapropistically motivated. E.g.
"irregardless" could be a blend of "regardless" and "irrespective",
likely produced by someone less than fully familiar with either.

--David

Mike Maxwell wrote:

> fieldworks_support at sil.org wrote:
> > But then I wonder, if you had an ungrammatical error that happened once
> > every 1000 uses of a word or construction, after several years you could
> > find a number of examples of the "incorrect" usage. Does this then
> make it
> > correct?
>
> Well that's part of the issue he raises.  Another part, of course, is
> what it means to be "correct" (cf. the usage of 'irregardless' to mean
> 'regardless', which I was once corrected for by a linguist, and which I
> agree is a mistake, (ir)regardless of how common it is).
>
> The other issue which Mark raises in this particular case is why, when
> we hear this, we do not (most of us) immediately notice the problem, and
> why for some people it may even be difficult to understand that there is
> a problem after it has been pointed out.  All of which leads one to
> wonder whether there really is a problem, and at what point such a usage
> could be considered to be "good" (whatever that means).
>
> > But to me there is a logic to this usage. What is meant here is "not
> > unpacked", or "ununpacked". The double negation (which here makes sense)
> > gets collapsed to a single negation, either because of the rules against
> > double negation in English, or as a contraction "ununpacked" >
> "unpacked".
>
> It's not unlikely, nor does it seem improbable, but I for one am not
> unsure: this newspeak is double-plus ungood.
> --
>       Mike Maxwell
>       Linguistic Data Consortium
>       maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu
>
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