Re: bared a strong resemblance
- From: Jim Lawton <ucan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 14:10:30 GMT
On Wed, 24 Aug 2005 11:38:45 GMT, jlawler@xxxxxxxxx (John Lawler) wrote:
>ray o'hara <roh@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
>>I read that in my local newspaper today in an op-ed column.
>>I always said it as bears or bore. Bears a strong resemblance.Bore a strong
>>resemblance.
>>Bears gets 14,000 google hits bared 28.
>
>Well, the natural way to comment on a resemblance is with 'bear',
>as you point out; I'd expect it to be far more common than 'bare'.
>
>'Bared' could be a misspelling, though the regular past tense in
>this case argues for a mistake in verb choice; at least the author
>knows 'bare' is a regular verb. But it could also be an eggcorn.
>
>Depends on the context (which isn't given). I could, for instance,
>say
>
> Pat Roberts' recent remarks on assassination have bared
> a strong resemblance between his politics and those of
> Stalin that I hadn't been aware of before.
>
>because the putative resemblance wasn't evident before, hence
>'bare' in the sense of 'reveal' is reasonable.
But so unusual that the meaning would be extremely obscure, to me at least. If
that sense was intended, I would expect to see :-
"Pat Roberts' recent remarks on assassination have laid bare
a strong resemblance between his politics and those of
Stalin that I hadn't been aware of before."
or something similar ...
> It's possible
>that the author might simply think 'bare' is the right verb to
>use because they have that interpretation of the idiom, which
>would make it an eggcorn.
>
>Alternatively, it's possible that the author is unaware of or
>unfamiliar with the irregular past tense 'bore' (or has got
>it confused with 'to bore'), and simply thinks 'bare' has a
>regular past form. Then they'd have to choose between 'beared'
>and 'bared' as spelling forms, and the latter would certainly win.
>
>-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler U Michigan Linguistics Dept
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> "A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he
> is not saying." -- G.K. Chesterton, 1936, "As I Was Saying"
--
Jim
"a single species has come to dominate ...
reproducing at bacterial levels, almost as an
infectious plague envelops its host"
http://tinyurl.com/c88xs
.
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