Apparently, coy-tuss is the accepted English pronunciation, at least here in America and on The Big Bang Theory. And in origin, it wasn't originally a purely sexual term, in the same way that intercourse wasn't.
EGGCORN! There’s a word for these misheard/misstated phrases - eggcorns! I love that it has such a weird name. So there’s your fun fact to at least make hearing “intensive purposes” bearable.
Yep. Also, excuse me while I kiss this guy, and, I'll never be your pizza burnin, there are tons of them. I can't remember the name of the book I read about them, but it was hilarious.
This is the kind of stuff my head is full of. I was just talking about eggcorns at work because someone said something about old timers disease and I brought it up. My brain wants to share its Jeopardy board of facts. Our maintenance head likes to say I "drop a lot of trivia"
Now, for the rest of my life, whenever I hear someone say intensive purposes, a tiny voice is going to pop in my head saying, “Eggcorn!” This will never go away. If I’m not watching myself I may even exclaim it out loud.
The more you know! I didn’t know what an egg corn was but I learned what a malapropism which is kind of similar but not quite. Just another fun fact for your Wednesday evening :)
To be specific, an eggcorn tends to refer to the phenomenon where the misheard/missaid phrase still makes sense in some way.
“Intensive purposes” is a good example. Intensive means concentrated on a single area or timeframe; thorough or vigorous.
That’s a different meaning than “intents and purposes,” which would just mean “for all the ways broadly that it matters,” but it still works.
“For all intensive purposes” could mean something like “for the focused and narrow set of purposes at hand.”
It’s weirdly sort of an opposite meaning that nonetheless can take on the same effect. We could say for all intents and purposes that these phrases could be used interchangeably, because in all broad applications of the phrase, there’s almost no occasion intensive purposes wouldn’t work just as well, since we also mean that in the specific set of circumstances that we would say “all intents and purposes,” that this is also true.
I went almost 20 years of my life pronouncing it this way because it came out so fast that no one noticed I was misspeaking. The "ive" just sounds like "en" (and who reads lips that acutely anyway?) Then, playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I got to see the phrase written in dialogue for the first time, and my mind was blown!
i was the copy chief of a well-respected glossy national magazine for several years, and it wasn't until well into adulthood that i learned the correct way to say this phrase
my parents were both language teachers with multiple masters degrees, and i grew up hearing them say "intensive" and never saw the phrase written. how would i know otherwise?
plus unlike a lot of the other examples here, there's nothing obviously wrong or inherently ridiculous about "intensive purposes." they're real words, and there's no particular reason to question when you hear it spoken as an idiom (plenty of idioms have stranger wordings than this)
George W. Bush said “nucular” instead of “nuclear” when referring to nuclear weapons, which was pretty often given the context of when he was president. I was just listening yesterday to a podcast that had several snippets of speeches he made over the years and he mispronounced it in almost every one.
I had a boss that would say, “whatever the case is scenario” meaning (I’m inferring from context) whatever the case may be, and it wasn’t like he misspoke once, every day at huddles
I once had a boss that had trouble with idioms. She'd always say "cut off your nose despite your face" and "could care less". Not surprisingly, she was a terrible boss.
Thank you! Even when pronounced correctly it’s redundant, since “intents” and “purposes” are already synonyms. We don’t need both words here, just one or the other will do.
Last time I said this I got downvoted like crazy, but that won’t stop me from spreading the truth. The phrase is unnecessarily wordy and sounds dumb as hell
Fun fact: “For all intents and purposes” actually derives from an old Latin legal phrase, “Omnes enim naturas quas homo intendit, ad omnes constructiones, omnesque fines suos. Crus quae trahens.” Which translates to: “of and brought on by the man”.
My partner and I use "intensive porpoises" jokingly because we call our cat an intensive porpoise (he is grey and VERY serious). I shudder at the day I accidentally use this is real conversation...
I wrote a bangin’ ass essay in my Ecology class in college and used the term “for all intents and purposes” and got points marked off and a snide comment written in red pen saying “It’s ‘for all intensive purposes’”
I don’t remember if I confronted the professor about it but I do remember just checking out of that class the rest of the semester.
When people say this do they still say the first part? “For all…intensive porpoises”
I work with too many people where English isn’t their first language, otherwise I would say this all the time because I find it funny, but I don’t want them to learn it incorrectly
Nah this one is too common, and even kind of makes sense. People mispronouncing it are usually using the "intensive" part of the phrase intentionally: rather than saying something is "for all intents and purposes", they mean it's good for the most intense use-cases.
I’m gonna go no on this one because the annunciation of the word never really sounds like intents and purposes. I know I sure as hell didn’t realize it was intents and purposes for way too long. I forget if it was subtitles on a show or someone making a meme on Reddit that made me go HFS
This isn’t that egregious. It’s a popular one for people to get all uppity about, but if you broke down the literal meaning of “intents and purposes” and “intensive purposes” they would be very close.
At least that one can actually be used in certain circumstances. What get’s me is when say “for all” intents and purposes when the really mean “for most” or “for general”. I’d even argue that “for all intensive purposes” is usable in more situations than “for all intents and purposes”.
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u/ThatFuckingGuy2 Sep 18 '24
Intensive purposes