You think that an eel around the neck is a bad thing, imagine what it's like to be attacked by a whole pack of them hunting cooperatively.* Eggcorns here.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Eggcorns* in the Wild: A rare sighting
Excerpts from a bad paper that takes 32 pages to say SFA and still get it consistently wrong. But it's in an Evo-Psych journal so no-one's expecting high standards.
You think that an eel around the neck is a bad thing, imagine what it's like to be attacked by a whole pack of them hunting cooperatively.
* Eggcorns here.
You think that an eel around the neck is a bad thing, imagine what it's like to be attacked by a whole pack of them hunting cooperatively.* Eggcorns here.
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17 comments:
Oh I get a pit in my stomach reading that. There's no excuse once so ever for that paper.
Seriously, that is a bad paper.
For all intensive purposes, it's a waste of electrons.
First thing I think of when I see "Eggcorn"' is a sweet, meringue-based Easter treat.
I had a pit in my stomach once... friggin' apricots!
Now I have "Eel around the fountain" running in my haid.
I see something like this, and I'm compelled (that means I can't stop myself!) to repeat these immortal lines:
When an eel bites your hand,
And it's not what you planned, That's a moray!
~
D'oh!
Thunder means "immoral."
Oh - tempura! [tastes] Oh, morays.
These things annoy me to no end.
Man, that's a tough road to hoe...
What? Are all the other Yanks pretending they know who Sweet Fanny Adams is, or are they too shy to ask?
Nope. I had to make a quick visit to the Wikidoodle to figure out what SFA meant.
It was there I discovered that there is a band with the name 'Super Furry Animals' and got distracted...
In a natural environment though, it is likely that hunger would have motivated them to redirect their obsessive tendencies toward food procurement.
Hunting is a simple repetitive task requiring one only to rock forwards and backwards to bite the various rodents passing by your face.
The good thing about evo-psych is the freedom from any need to know anything about the trait or behaviour that you're retconning with a Just-So back-story.
For this paper, the author seems to have made a cursory literature search about autism and cherry-picked whatever details fit his "alternative ecological niche" story. He cites literature reviews rather than original sources, gets things glaringly wrong like the gaze-avoidance business, and uses the No-True-Scotsman argument to account for forms of autism with genetic causes that don't have any imaginable survival value, e.g. Fragile-X Syndrome: such cases are not True Autism.
You know what would have been a simple repetitive activity? Proof-reading. Maybe then the author or the editors would have noticed the entire repeated paragraph in the paper.
...entire repeated paragraph
I was always told that the key to good teaching is repetition.
The key to good teaching is repetition.
Repetition?
I hadn't heard that before
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