Episode: 3608
Title: HPR3608: Battling with English - part 5
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3608/hpr3608.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 02:06:01

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,608 for Wednesday 1 June 2022.
Today's show is entitled, battling with English Part 5.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, confused homophones, misunderstanding words from other countries, it's corned.
Hello everybody, welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
This is Dave Morris with another episode.
Today's episode is one in the series I've called, battling with English.
I'm not a series, but the one with the title, battling with English, this is number 5.
I'm going to talk today about three topics.
First one is talking about homophones, that's words that sound similar.
Then some of the words, one of the words that we've taken into the English language
from another language that people seem to make mistakes with a lot.
The third subject is to look at egg corn, which I mentioned in a previous thing,
which I'll expand on a bit more later as I get there.
Let's look first at homophones.
As I said, these are words that are spelled differently, but sound the same.
One of the most quoted groups, when people are pointing out that they're wrong,
or just you see them a lot in the wild, are the words rain,
rain and rain.
They sound exactly the same, but three different spellings.
I've got a few definitions.
When you go digging for definitions, you sometimes get loads of them.
What I've tried to do is to point you at some useful dictionaries,
so you can go and look for yourself and just extract a few, just to give you the gist.
Rain, R-E-I-G-N, what it means, as a noun, is the period of time
when a royal person rules a country, so you would say something like
under the rain of the Stuart Kings, for example.
The second meaning is also a noun, a period of time,
when a person feeling or quality is important,
so it's sort of using the same idea, but in a different context.
So you'd say something like his successful rain as manager of the team.
So somebody was the manager of the team and you'd call the period and they were
that had that post their rain as that particular thing.
So the other meaning is as a verb, which means to rule a country
or to have power or control.
So you might say in England, the sovereign rains, but does not rule.
So that's the first meaning.
Second, the first word in the armophone group.
Second word is rain, R-E-I-N.
And as a noun, it means a strap attached to the bridle of a horse
or other animal to control their movement.
It can also mean a means of restraining or checking.
As a verb, it means to restrain or control.
I'll be talking about correct and incorrect usage in a second.
The third one, which really shouldn't be in this group, it is a homophone.
Nobody mistakes this one is rain as in R-A-I-N,
which is, as you well know, I'm sure a water falling to earth in drops
or two falling drops of water as a verb from the cloud.
Okay, so those are the three words.
And what you find is they get swapped around all over the place.
So there's an expression to rain in using the horse bridle thing,
R-E-I-N, rain in.
So often see it written as rain in, R-E-I-G-N,
which is the royalty control version.
So to rain in means to slow something down and get it under control.
And it's related to horse riding.
It's what you do when you've only ridden one horse in my entire life, I think.
And I wasn't controlling it, it was being laid.
But if you want to slow a horse down,
you pull on the reins as a signal to slow down.
So to rain with the monarchy version is obviously incorrect.
Another instance using the rain, the two rains,
forget the water falling out of the sky business.
So free rain is, I mean, it means to give complete freedom,
to give full control.
And it's related to horse riding.
It's when you basically net the horse go where it wants to.
So you would spell that R-E-I-N, free rain.
So you've basically given the horse control,
possibly because it would make better decisions than you will in that situation.
But you often see it written as R-E-I-G-N, free rain.
So that's obviously correct when you think about it.
Third usage, you might say anarchy reigns supreme for country or wherever it is in a state of anarchy.
And it's overcome everything, it's controlled everything.
That would be the meaning, there's nothing but anarchy going on.
But the incorrect version would use anarchy reigns supreme using R-E-I-N-S,
which is to do with guiding a horse is one of them to do with the meaning of that phrase.
So I'll leave that subject there.
But have a good look at these, because it's, I mean, the problem is,
you know that there are these various spellings.
When it comes to the two rains, the third watery rain,
you're not going to, I think I've never seen anybody make that mistake in the samples I've given.
I don't think you would easily fall into that trap.
But the two forms of rain, the horsey one and the monarchy one,
you could so easily be writing a sentence,
and you write the wrong version without really thinking.
Of course, spell checkers are not going to help you,
because they're just looking for to complete a word with something based on frequency of use or whatever.
So you're going to, the chances are you'll end up with the wrong one.
So the thing to do is to be a little bit more alert about these things.
Having remembered which is which, which I'm sure most people do,
just that they stumble when it comes to the writing.
So let's look at a word from another language,
which I hear people using a lot, but infrequently it's used wrongly.
And that's because I think it's misunderstood.
It's not part of English as such, it's an import.
So the word I'm going to look at is pundit, p-u-n-d-i-t.
And I've got a pointer to the Wikipedia definition,
and it says, I've got a weak quote from it here,
a pundit is a person who offers to mass media opinion or commentary
on a particular subject area, most typically politics,
the social sciences, technology or sport.
So pundit is a noun, and it means a learned person,
an expert or authority.
Or another meaning is a person who makes comments or judgments
in an authoritative manner.
The word originates from the Hindi term, pandit,
which means a learned man.
It was brought into English from India,
maybe as long ago as the 1600s has been in English for a long, long time.
As I was checking this out, I remember hearing when I was a kid,
the news at the time would talk about the prime minister
of the public of India.
Mr. Nairu, they talked about.
And he was referred to as Pandit Nairu,
a program, so that was his sort of common name
within Indian English.
So the learned prime minister Nairu.
So what you see is the original word pundit,
P-U-N-D-I-T, is often spoken and indeed written as pundit,
P-U-N-D-A-N-T.
Another incorrect version is pundit, P-U-N-D-I-N-T.
Another case of restructuring the word,
which is unfamiliar probably, into a more anglicized version.
In fact, I was amazed to hear,
just as I was getting ready for this show,
I was watching a YouTube video,
and somebody I follow, I won't say who it is because it seemed like
too much like finger pointing.
But in the talk, which was quite erudite and quite deep,
the word pundit was used at least twice,
and that seems to be very, very strange.
I don't understand how people can have a level of education
and be alert to the ways of the world and get that one wrong.
But I'm probably doing the same myself somewhere other, not knowing.
So the final topic is look at egg corns.
Now, the egg corn is a word that was coined by Professor Jeffrey Pullham in 2003,
and it came from a linguistic discussion of a case where
that phrase, egg corn, e-g-g-g-s-b-s-e-r-n,
had been used instead of acorn, which is fascinating.
I don't know where that had come from.
Anyway, the term is used to describe cases where someone uses analogy
and logic to make sense of an expression,
which uses the term that's not meaningful to them.
The way acorn was not meaningful to the person who called it an egg corn,
I don't know.
But egg corns are of interest to linguists since they show language evolving
and indicate possible reasons why a change has occurred.
So, for example, the expression in one fell swoop,
one fell swoop is quite commonly replaced by in one foul swoop.
Because the word fell, F-E-D-L, is not much used in common English today.
And foul seems to replace the meaning, I think.
You hear, if you read some sorts of horror stories and things,
they talk about fell beasts, where fell means evil or something.
To that fact, and foul is sort of in the same general area.
But you will see the egg corn in one foul swoop.
So, what I've done here is there are links to where you can find out more about egg corns.
There's a whole database full of them and lots of discussion about them on various websites.
But I'm going to just give you four examples just to give you something to think about.
So, the egg corn, the first one is the egg corn is damp squid.
So, damp D-A-M-P, squid, S-Q-U-I-D.
So, a large cephalopod mask, that happens to be damp, which is not different.
But the original is a damp squib, S-Q-U-I-B.
So, a firework, which is, which not, they were called squibs when I was a kid, but then I'm a bit old.
And there are, I think there's still a firework called up, you really hear them.
You really hear the name.
But if one becomes wet and fails to go off, it's just a sort of expression of something that doesn't work properly or fails to meet expectations.
So, damp squib is a wet firework, basically.
But damp squid has become quite an interesting alternative.
Second egg corn is for all intensive purposes.
And the original is for all two all intents and purposes.
So, intents as E-N-T-I-N-T-E-N-T-S, sorry, and purposes.
So, what the mean, the original meaning was, for every functional purpose, in every practical sense, in every important respect.
And it comes from English law in the 1500s.
People like to say things like this and take them from the legal world, but to all intents and purposes.
I certainly heard it. My father used to work in the law business, but so he would say this.
But it's been converted as an egg corn into for all intensive purposes.
Now, here's the next one. The original is Alzheimer's disease.
Alzheimer was the medical person who described the disease.
And the egg corn has is old-timers disease.
Well, the disease is a neurodegenerative thing that's commonest in people over 65 years of age.
But the egg corn almost makes sense, I think.
Alzheimer's, why would you call it that?
There is Alzheimer. Old-timers disease, if you're over 65, then that probably fits, isn't it?
Yeah. Interesting.
The last one is something you see amazingly often.
It was pointed out when I was reading the stuff, reading up some of the examples and so on.
The even JK rolling uses it wrongly in one of our Harry Potter books.
And the original is with baited breath.
And it means to wait with the anticipation or excite baited means restrained.
And it's actually a shortened form of abated.
The images of one holding one's breath in excitement.
But the egg corn version is with baited breath, where baited is not B-A-T-E-D.
But B-A-I-T-E-D.
In other words, your breath has got some sort of bait in it, like, you know, you use when you fish,
put on the end of your line to catch a fish or something.
So I thought, as I was browsing about this, I came across a poem that I vaguely had come across before.
The guy called Geoffrey Taylor, 1933, wrote a poem entitled Cruel Clever Cat.
And he's basically making fun of the egg corn and baited breath.
So here's the poem.
I think I'm allowed to say it on the podcast, aren't I?
Sally, having swallowed cheese, direct down holes, the scented breeze,
enticing thus with baited breath, nice mice to an untimely death.
You get the picture, I'm sure.
Okay, we'll call that quits, and I hope you found it interesting,
and I'll do another one of these in due course.
Okay, bye.
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