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.

17 comments:

Hamish Mack said...

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.

Smut Clyde said...

For all intensive purposes, it's a waste of electrons.

Dr.KennethNoisewater said...

First thing I think of when I see "Eggcorn"' is a sweet, meringue-based Easter treat.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

I had a pit in my stomach once... friggin' apricots!

Now I have "Eel around the fountain" running in my haid.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

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!
~

Dr.KennethNoisewater said...

D'oh!

tigris said...

Thunder means "immoral."

ckc (not kc) said...

Oh - tempura! [tastes] Oh, morays.

ckc (not kc) said...

These things annoy me to no end.

mikey said...

Man, that's a tough road to hoe...

M. Bouffant said...

What? Are all the other Yanks pretending they know who Sweet Fanny Adams is, or are they too shy to ask?

mikey said...

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...

Substance McGravitas said...

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.

Smut Clyde said...

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.

ckc (not kc) said...

...entire repeated paragraph

I was always told that the key to good teaching is repetition.

Smut Clyde said...

The key to good teaching is repetition.

Hamish Mack said...

Repetition?
I hadn't heard that before