But you probably shouldn't hold your breath. YouTube comments are an excellent source of eggcorns. They are also depressing, because when you read them and see how much of the population is quite literally functionally illiterate, you have to weep for the future of the world. Automotive forums are another source of endless amusement/depression. I can't even begin to count the number of times I've read questions and comments about repairing the breaks (the things that arrest forward motion) on a Jeep.
Well, I'm not sure things are that bad. Remember that most of these people have had zero opportunity to see anything they've typed appear in print until the advent of the Internet. If they'd submitted letters to their local papers and had them printed, they would have gone through an editing process where most of these things were weeded out. But now all they need is rudimentary typing skills and an internet connection to beam their written word all around the world. So these folks have always been with us, but you've never read anything they wrote.
This is true. I remember I used to lament the state of literacy shortly after getting on the internet, until one day I thought back to high school. The teacher had several students each stand up and read from a book. I was amazed that a large percentage of them had all kinds of trouble. And I mean, in many cases, struggling to pronounce basic words, anything more difficult than Dog or Cat. Until that moment I assumed just about everybody in the school was at least functionally literate, but that shattered that assumption. For some time after that I'd randomly look around at people in public and wonder how many can actually read and write. Now I understand what rare achievements they are and always have been.
I think there's also a feedback element. When I was growing up, and even until I was thirty or so, if you saw something in print it had probably gone through a professional editing process of some sort so you had a good chance of internalizing "proper" English grammar, spelling, etc. Now, especially if you aren't a regular reader of traditionally published books or professional mass media, a lot of what you see online has not been subject to any editing or proofreading, so your brain is basically marinating in wrong answers. I've caught myself using the wrong "there" while typing in recent weeks, and this is something I emphatically know the meanings of.
Yep, it definitely is. Just ran across this headline. Serious stuff, but a really egregious eggcorn: "10 missing children recovered, more than 200 arrested in Ohio anti-human trafficking operation" Those poor 200 missing children who were arrested! In fact, are there 2 eggcorns? I never knew there was trafficking in anti-humans going on.
It should be based on, right? How can something be based 'off of' something else? For one thing to be a base for something else, the something else must be on top of it. Not off of it.
You've forced me to look up things on the internet in order to back my argument. Here's what I found: Based Off Is Off Base Enough is enough. It’s time to blow the whistle on an obnoxious faux idiom that has the popular culture under its spell. The offending usage is based off and its alternate form, based off of. Everyone knows the correct phrase, based on, which has been around forever. But somehow, on became off, or worse, off of—a compound preposition that all English authorities reject as substandard. Source Hah! I like the term used on that page—Frankenstein formations: "You know, grab a part from here, another part from over there, and stitch them together to create a monstrously unsuitable word or phrase. Witness how the unholy merging of regardless and irrespective begat irregardless, a gruesome beast that even pedants with pitchforks can’t drive from the countryside."
Just because it’s not something you would use in a term paper doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Maybe it’s a question of geography, but you hear it all the time where I live. give me a break
Ok, if we want to go that route, here's an article from Merriam Webster, which is, I believe, the standard authority on American English. It says: "While it's more common to say that something is "based on" something else—as in "The movie is based on a book"—people increasingly say "based off" or "based off of": "The movie is based off (of) a book." "Based off" isn't wrong, but it's relatively new, and is likely to sound wrong to some people." 'Based On' or 'Based Off': Which is Right? | Merriam-Webster ya, but how did anything ever become right? It was widespread where some people lived. It's a somewhat recent prepositional construction. I suppose you could say that makes it wrong but that seems like a pretty hidebound way to look at things, considering the words and phrases in common use now that people once judged to be absolutely beyond the pale of acceptable usage.
Ok, then I guess this whole thread is out the window, and there's no point in trying to learn proper English or grammar anymore. If masses of uneducated people say it, then it must be right!
lmao, but you have to admit there’s some truth in what I say. Have you ever read Chaucer or Shakespeare? It’s not modern English that they were writing in.
It's true that language changes, but if a dictionary starts to legitimize our slide into illiteracy that's going the wrong way. That's when it's time to hold onto your older editions, from when they actually showed proper usage. Both our positions are clear, I'm not going to continue arguing about it.
Yours isn't quite; do you think that the use of "based off of" is indicative of a slide into illiteracy?
But that's exactly what dictionaries do. They get revised periodically in order to reflect current usage. I'm old enough to remember the furor that developed when "ain't" was first added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Mercifully, "irregardless" hasn't made it in ... yet.
That's especially true when you encounter words in print that you've never heard spoken. When I hear people pronounce a word wrong, I don't think they're illiterate. It's just that they've never heard the word pronounced by somebody else before. ("Yosemite" comes out "Yose mite," for example. And people living in La Jolla are perpetually amused by how the name of their town is pronounced by tourists.) In fact, I consider it a mark of distinction that these people have transcended an unpromising upbringing and have incorporated words that have been introduced to them only in print.
Oh absolutely! But to be clear, the people I'm talking about were struggling to pronounce almost every word, and had to frequently stop like children encountering a difficult reading lesson for the first time. Not sure if that's even what you meant though. There are many words I've seen in print and have no idea how to pronounce. I learned a couple the hard way in a speech class once, where I pronounced deity die-dee (like a child's word for diapers). There were a few more peppered in as well that I don't remember now. The teacher told me to look words up when I don't know the pronunciation, but the problem was, I thought I DID know it!! I had always assumed that's how it's pronounced. Just like some people say foil-age rather than foliage.
