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.
What is a wrong triangle? Did it not tri hard enough? Not a dad joke, just the detritus on the floor of my brain when thinking too much about why English doesn’t drive new learners completely mad.
You can’t square a circle, but you can circle the square by going around the block.
The word for a seven-sided shape isn’t a septagon but a heptagon, redolent not of geometry but of an early fan of Jazz—a hepcat.
Telegrams can be sent, but parallelograms have sides which are stationary and never shall meet (unless Einstein gets involved, or note paper is decorated with them, in which case they are stationery). So, if stationary or stationery, parallelograms stay put, but if Euclid is kicked out of the party, the woogliness of spacetime could allow them to bend and flex through teleparallel gravity, and every eight-year-old who failed that quiz just unfailed it.
If the suffix -gon means “angle or corner” as in hexagon (which sounds suspiciously like witchcraft to me), is a nonagon invisible? Help me Rhombus, help help me Rhombus! Help me Rhombus yeah, get it outta my head.
I’m going to let Euclid duke it out with Boethius on the frequency and mix of Greek and Latin used (spoiler alert: Greek wins). From the future, we would have appreciated only Greek on this one, but we’ll go with the mad mathematical mashup, and just enjoy the fun of messing up our own malformed modern metaphorical manifestations. Don’t let the hyperbola toss you beyond reason.
They’re trying to square a circle in a round hole.
The circular file is going around the drain.
Line up in a circle.
We triangulated a radius of the fugitive's location.
He finally squared himself around.
For more fun with geometric etymologies click here.
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I'm going with "The circular file is going around the drain." The story of my life in higher education administration.
Kate Morgan Reade: The circular file is going around the drain.
As a bureaucrat (Navy, Air Force) for 41 years, I can relate to THAT one!!
Very good misiphors/risiphors.
We must be able to do something with the "hypotenuse of the triangle."
Something like --
"The whirlpool swirled the ship down the hypotenuse of the Bermuda Triangle . . ."
And, variations upon the same!