It’s Thursday: time to get into it with mangled metaphors, idioms, and other valiant-but-failed attempts at figurative language. The results are inadvertent yet successful attempts at levity, jocularity, and generally increased levels of dopamine.
I destroy and recombine perfectly serviceable metaphors, idioms, and other innocents on a regular basis. Because I avidly collect others’ with glee, I know I’m not alone.
I’ve heard them called malaphors and malaprops, but I strongly disagree with using malaprop as any part of a description; first, because the term is ill-applied in an ironic twist (malaprops are intentional attempts to sound grand); and second, because mal itself, meaning “bad” is simply untrue—fun with words is never bad!
I’d go for something like risiphor or ridiphor, using the Latin risus, past participle of ridere "to laugh," meaning "laughable, capable of exciting laughter, comical" + pherein "to carry, bear" (from PIE root *bher- (1) "to carry," also "to bear children"). The result? “bearing laughter offspring.” Perfect!
As a bonus, who could resist saying, “That is patently risiphorous!” or “Another great ridiphor, Elizabeth!”
Although it bothers some who actually get these expressions right, the endless combinations that the rest of us come up with deserve a wide-girthed mirth berth.
And, even though these might technically appear to be…well…mistakes, I think they show a lack of rigidity at worst, and a creative brilliance at best. In fact, an utterance combining more than two original elements is golden in my book.
So, I say we enjoy these twisted treasures for all they’re cracked up to be. As my daughter used to say when she was but a wee sass, “Mom, that tickles my timbers!”
Happily, it’s genetic.
The ubiquity of animal references in well-known sayings from the past which are still in use today testifies to the importance of our fellow creatures in daily life.
Those of us who are sublimely untalented in repeating the prescribed versions of said aphorisms nevertheless manage to get the point across, adding ridiculous glee to each iteration as it escapes into the wild.
Hold your breath till the cows turn blue.
We need to get all our ducks in the same pond.
I smell a rat and I'm getting to the bottom of it!
Slap happy as a clam.
They were in a stew over a sacred cow.
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I'm going with "Hold your breath till the cows turn blue" because I immediately thought of a painting in my bedroom of a man playing the saxophone with a cow as listener. The artist titled it "Play Until the Cows Come Home." And the color palette has a lot of blue.
Kate Morgan Reade: All of them, but "We need all our ducks in one pond" paints the picture well for me.
As one who studies the Bhagavad Gita and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, I related to: They were in a stew over a sacred cow.
Using "stew" both symbolically and literally.
Very good!