Which cheeses w/red wine(s)?

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
As I have said, the difference is not between correctness and usage because usage just is what it is and will always win out. It's between changes that impoverish and those that enrich (in my infallible judgement, of course). The shift you mark in bully pulpit actually seems to me a good one since it creates a meaningful metaphor where before there was just slack slang. I prefer under weigh (the original formulation) to under way because the former's metaphor is not yet as dead as a door nail, but both formulations at least attach to some referential meaning. I don't even see why one would use "begs the question" instead of "raises the question," although I guess people think it means "begs for us to ask the question" or something like that.

I am with Jayson in not even being able to guess what people who write doggy dog world have in mind. But I assure him, the formulation is a common student error and just ready to become usage.
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I guess I have a second thing coming.

Does doggy-dog mean something? In common parlance?
 
Yes - well, misprision seems a bit stern - but is it supposed to mean something? Bully and question begging have both acquired meanings different from the original.

Doggy-dog doesn't even have an apparent semantic relationship to dog-eat-dog; is it supposed to mean something else among those who use it?
 
No,it's a straightforward error. People who hear the phrase dog eat dog as doggy dog and write it that way (or, I suppose, say it that way). It doesn't mean anything different. It's like hearing "under weigh" as "under way" and so changing one to the other except that it's less meaningful.
 
Miss Prision is an associate editor of large portions of the internet. Mostly, it appears to be people who have heard a phrase but never seen it written so they guess. A very common one is "would of" for "would have"; a Very Very Famous Software Company published its flagship product with a default error message thus: "An unknown error has occured."; and so on. Maybe I'll post a few of the better ones here as I encounter them. This is WordDisorder, right?
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
People who hear the phrase dog eat dog as doggy dog and write it that way (or, I suppose, say it that way). It doesn't mean anything different.
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Really? Surely a Doggy-dog world is a better place than a Dog-eat-dog world.
 
originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
People who hear the phrase dog eat dog as doggy dog and write it that way (or, I suppose, say it that way). It doesn't mean anything different.
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Really? Surely a Doggy-dog world is a better place than a Dog-eat-dog world.
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Well, a dog's life isn't much better, at least according to the meaning of the expression, even though most dog's lives have looked pretty cushy to me.
 
Was his middle name Dog and his last name Dog as well, or was his last name Dog and the second Dog was a nominative to distinguish him from some possible Doggy Dog Lion or Doggy Dog Ardvark? If the latter, then his name was actually Doggy Dog, Dog.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Was his middle name Dog and his last name Dog as well, or was his last name Dog and the second Dog was a nominative to distinguish him from some possible Doggy Dog Lion or Doggy Dog Ardvark? If the latter, then his name was actually Doggy Dog, Dog.
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You’ve caught Jay in an inescapable Catch-22.
 
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