“Original Copy”
February 22nd, 2009, by Kirk Mahoney
I saw (quote) “ORIGINAL COPY” (unquote) misspelled here yesterday while writing my blog post about Engrish.com.
The phrase went right past me when I first saw it yesterday — probably because it is so common, especially in American English.
But reading the phrase a second time made me think, “Huh?!”
How can something be original and a copy at the same time?
It cannot, so this phrase is a self-negation.
For fun, I searched Google for “original copy” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 1,100,000 matches.
Yikes!
Copyright © 2009 Kirk Mahoney, Ph.D.
Related Posts
