Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I’ve been collecting malapropisms in my journal for several years. Among the more interesting verbal misfires in my records are what might be called “conflated metaphors.” Our minds seems to believe that if one metaphor is good, two are better, especially if they can be sandwiched into the same phrase. An academic friend of mine heard the wife of a graduate student at the University of Toronto say “I wouldn’t know him from Adam’s hole.†An acquaintance of mine once objected to someone trying to “snowplow†her with too many excuses. In 1995 I heard a speaker warn his audience that if they all rushed to the stairs at the same time there would be a “bottlejam.†The next year someone on the radio said that a comment had “hit the nose on the head.†In 1997 I completed the hat trick when I overheard someone refusing to “stick his neck out on a limb.†That was my only threepeat, but good conflations continued to pop up in subsequent years. At a meeting I attended someone tried to emphasize the simplicity of the task at hand by describing it as â€not rocket surgery.†Recently friends who know that I collect these overstuffed metaphors relayed to me two new ones. One gem is from the radio: “The deal,†the speaker said, “seems to be unraveling at the seams.†The other comes, woe to the honorable profession, from a meeting of librarians. A report was summarized with the tag line: “that’s it, boiled down to a nutshell.â€
Might some of these conflated metaphors belong to the species eggcorn?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Welcome to the Eggcorn Website kem. The items you describe are classified as idiom blends. You may be able to find a more in depth discussion of them at the Language Log website.
Eggcorns are rather different from idiom blends; Eggcorns usually derive from a mishearing of an idiom rather than the merging of two familiar ones. Granted, both routes tend to generate new imagery so it’s easy to see the source of the confusion.
Last edited by jorkel (2007-08-28 20:07:41)
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Ah, yes. That’s the term I’m looking for. Idiom blend. Plenty of web hits on the phrase. A much better expressioni than “conflated metaphor.” I also discovered that a search for “farberisms” led to a number of examples.
But the misfires I cited in my post are a specific kind of idiom blend. An idiom blend, as I understand it, arises from the conflation of any two idioms, even if they aren’t related in meaning. “You only get one bite at the bullet” is a sample idiom blend cited in web discussions. A word such as “bottlejam,” which is primed by “bottleneck” and “traffic jam,” are conflations of idioms and metaphors that overlap in meaning. Shouldn’t these blends have their own name? Idiomelanges? Conjuphors?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Sounds like some of those people weren’t exactly the sharpest bulbs in the six-pack.
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