dead metaphors are really interesting honestly and specifically i’m interested in when they become malapropisms
like, the concept being, people are familiar with the phrase and what people use it to mean metaphorically, but it’s not common knowledge anymore what the metaphor was in literal reference to. people still say “toe the line” but don’t necessarily conjure up the image of people standing at the starting line of a race, forbidden from crossing over it. people still say “the cat is out of the bag” without necessarily knowing it’s a sailors’ expression referring to a whip being brought out for punishment. some metaphors are so dead we don’t even know where they come from; like, there are ideas about what “by hook or by crook” references, but no one is entirely sure. nobody knows what the whole nine yards are.
and then you throw in a malaprop or a mondegreen or two, where because people don’t know what the actual words of the expression refer to, they’re liable to replace them with similar sounding words (see “lack toast and tolerant”). so we can literally go from a phrase referencing a common, everyday part of life to a set of unfixed, contextless sounds with a completely different meaning. that’s fascinating. what an interesting piece of the way language and culture are living, changing, coevolving things.
maybe part of the reason we can’t figure out where some phrases come from is that over time the words themselves have changed! one of the theories about “the whole nine yards” is that it’s a variant of “the whole ball of wax,” which some people further theorize was originally “the whole bailiwick,” meaning just “the whole area”! the addition of “nine yards” might be related to “dressed to the nines,” which might reference the fucking Greek muses! language is so weird and cool! (and I only know any idioms in two languages!)
the point is. I just came across the words “nip it in the butt” in a piece of published, professional fiction, and now I can’t stop giggling.
someone put ‘within a hare’s breath’ in an AO3 tag and it stopped me cold. because you’re leaving the general sense of the idiom and its physical phonemes almost intact, and yet replacing the actual words and metaphor with something completely unrelated.
a hare’s breath is small in a completely different way than a hair’s breadth and works very differently as a unit of distance.
and yet the general idea of ‘small, close, tiny gap, no barrier, a near thing, almost’ remains intact, and if you didn’t know what had happened there you would never figure it out.
My 3-year-old attends a nursery with a colony of miner bees that is extremely active in the garden in spring and autumn. Miner bees are so called because they make small industrious burrows in the ground, and make a big fuss of doing so. The miner bees are harmless but tremendously nosy and officious: they are constantly examining the children and trying to chase them away from the holes, with as much effectiveness as you can expect. They won’t sting - but they swarm and buzz around and it makes you flinch. The nursery owner refuses (quite rightly) to delete the colony, and children are instructed by staff to be aware of the bees, but to remain neutral.
I suddenly listened a bit closer and realised that the child calls them “minder bees.”
“Minder bees?”
“Yes - because you have to mind der bees.”
What a completely different framing. Suddenly you hear a small child growing up with instruction from people with West Country accents, and the vague idea they have of the British idiom of “minding:” there is “don’t mind the bees” (don’t be bothered by the bees) and “mind the bees” (be aware of the bees) and “childminders” (nursery staff who look after children.) here is a child who does not know about mining, apart from being clear on what is mine or yours. But the child knows that Minding is a kind of caring: simultaneously looking after, and being/not being annoyed by. Here is a child who is clearly instructed frequently to mind der bees.
And the bees on their part definitely mind. They are minding the children, but they don’t really mind the children being there. They are very minder bees.
If left to themselves and the children, perhaps, that’s what they would become.
And Costis heard, as clearly as he’d heard the king speaking, another voice. It said, “Go to bed.”
Eugenides the man and Eugenides the God, an illustration of one of my favourite scenes from The King of Attolia! This was my gift for @etoilegarden for the @hamiathesgiftexchange!
