"...the Democratic candidate for mayor is making an appeal along racial lines to garnish support..." The Capital
If you don't agree with me that it should be garner support, you are in a serious minority, viz 4,610 hits for "garnish," 214,000 for the real one. But there it is, right in the Capital's big lede. Not that I care, naturally, but click that link and see what marginal company our fancy hometown paper is keeping with its word choice.
Anyway, the interesting question is really whether it's a malapropism or an eggcorn. You're right to be confused about these. I only know about "eggcorns" from reading something called Language Log, where the term was coined. It's sometimes pretty interesting, sometimes very boring. Their ongoing fascination with eggcorns goes on here, but also check out this, their fine taste in comics.
The difference between our two new vocabulary words seems to be that eggcorns form a new sort of meaning relating to the old word or phrase, while malapropisms are just fuck ups. Those links'll take you to the examples, and of course scroll down a skosh for my first post on my roommate Kristen's gibberish.Got me thinking about spoonerisms, too. Hilarious. And this caught my eye: Rickyisms!
And remember, if your malapropism doesn't go away after four hours, call a doctor.
.jpg)
4 comments:
Nice find. I'm casting my vote with malapropism. The eggcorn is at least semantically plausible and allegedly exhibits creativity or logic, whereas "garnish support" is just editorial sloppiness.
I thought, for a second, that it might even imply the opposite of what was intended, but as it turns out the "garnish" in "garnish wages" has a meaning specific to its monetary context.
Even if the word was intended in the sense of "furnish, embellish, equip with accessories," to do that correctly (if awkwardly) here, you'd still have to garnish the candidate, not the support.
In the meantime, you might have noticed that Mr. Stewart's oopsie sentence (which, incidentally, also lacked a comma before the conjunction joining two independent clauses) has been rewritten, sans garnish.
Here's what I've been able to excavate of the original:
"In the final stretch of the Annapolis elections, the Democratic candidate for mayor is making an appeal along racial lines to garnish support and an anonymous civic organization is depicting an openly gay candidate as a child molester..."
And here's the fix:
"In the final days leading up to today's election in Annapolis, an anonymous organization was depicting an openly gay candidate as a child molester, while the Democratic candidate for mayor was making an appeal for voters along racial lines."
What would the latecomers do without you? :)
That's funny; I know the guy who wrote this column. I'm glad to see he noticed and corrected the mistake.
I must say, though, that I find your roommate's cooperation of words is even more so!
Thanks Izgubljena!
The Capital actually just sent the article straight to me hot off the presses, they were so excited.
Kevin, maybe your friend was hungry.
I'm glad in the end they scrapped the whole garner/garnish (garter?) thing altogether and went for "making an appeal" - but we know your dirty secret, Capital newspaper!
for all intensive purposes this post is awesome
Post a Comment