Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I found that one at allrecipes.com. I can’t imagine what was going through the mind of the person who wrote it. I can easily picture someone saddling up a horse, or bellying up to a buffet (or more commonly, to a bar), but saddling up to the buffet? I don’t get a clear picture from that. Nevertheless, googling “saddle up to the bar” yields 494 unique hits. I don’t get it.
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I expect it’s a malapropism for sidling up . To me also it doesn’t make enough sense to call it an eggcorn.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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David Bird wrote:
“Sidled with†has become a ugly stud on the mother tongue.
There’s a yo’ mama joke there, but I don’t think I need to explicate it for this crowd.
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From a political discussion in my local online community:
“In my opinion, it is indicative of something if the wine industry and other titans of Sonoma County business are throwing their weight behind Carrillo…Saddling up to wealth has implications…”
This is looking more like an eggcorn to me now. The image of “saddling up” lacks the implication of furtiveness that’s surely there in most uses of “sidling up”, but in both cases, the person doing the sidling/saddling is getting ready to embark on some enterprise, perhaps a dangerous or adventurous one.
Googling “saddling up to” yields somewhere around 140 unique eggcornish hits, but that’s a very vague estimate, as it’s hard to tell in some cases—in the absence of references to horses, etc.— whether the furtiveness of sidling is implied, or perhaps “saddling up to” a bar has a more Western-movie implication to some. Anyway, a few examples:
“Looks like the green-toothed, cheese-eating surrender monkeys are saddling up to the hoon-hating Pope.”
”... and I looking over the selection of oranges at the vegetable stand when out of the corner of my I a see a sweet old lady saddling up to us.”
“It is quite an indictment of a supposed Labour Party leader that Blair spent much of his time in office saddling up to the business community…”
Unlike the above examples, this next one shows no implication of furtiveness, but there’s a “sidling” connection in the implication of contiguity:
“Saddling up to calming Fennel Creek with its adjacent large greenbelts, this superior location still has a rural feel.”
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Hey, gang, I can definitely get a picture of strapping myself to some kind of seat at a buffet, and settling in for a long grazing session.
Bruce
“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin
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I recently heard someone speak of an scenario featuring a guy in a bar, with a flirtatious woman “saddling up to him.” The speaker kind of waggled her hips as she said the word.
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It struck me that the word “sashay” would fit the context pretty well; maybe it had some influence on the speaker’s word choice. “Saddle” could be a blend of sashay with sidle, I suppose. The idea of saddle bags, somewhat analogous to the wagging hips, also came to mind.
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I think the word choice may be standard for the speaker, though I did not ask.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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