Growth sprout.
Biting my time.
Duck tape.
Two peas in a pond.
Escape goat.
You know that mortifying moment
when you use a common phrase in front of everyone,
only to find out you’ve been saying it wrong for years?
Well, the good news is you can stop that shame spiral in its tracks
because, according to the nice folks at the Oxford English Dictionary,
we’ve all done it.
Mishearing popular idioms, metaphors and sayings
is much more common than you’d think and actually
if enough people make the same mistake
it can come to take root in our collective consciousness.
Sometimes even replacing the original phrasing entirely.
For example, if someone were wildly mistaken,
would you say they had another thing coming
or another think coming?
Believe it or not,
according to Oxford’s language monitoring databases
the original phrase was another think coming,
which to lots of you probably sounds all kinds of wrong.
If someone strips down to their birthday suit,
would you say they were butt naked or buck naked?
While buck naked is the earlier form,
nobody would bat an eyelid
or, to misuse a common phrase,
an eyelash, if you were to say ‘butt naked’.
These are the sort of changes
that keep lexicographers busy updating their dictionaries
so that they reflect how language is really being used by people,
rather than instruct on how language should be used.
So tell that to the next pedant who tries to correct you.
In fact, many common turns of phrase have had fascinating journeys
evolving into the popular sayings we all know and love today.
To curry favour, meaning to ingratiate yourself with someone,
has nothing to do with buttering them up by buying them a vindaloo.
Its original form was actually to curry Favel,
which will make absolutely no sense to you
unless you’ve brushed up on your medieval French literature.
Favel, or Fauvel,
was the name of a horse in an early 14th Century poem
who was renowned for his cunning and duplicity.
To curry Favel meant to groom him with a special comb,
still called a curry comb today.
Favel was commonly misheard as favour
and the rest, as they say, is history.
Basically the term ‘to curry favour’ has lived such a rich life
it would probably have a much better Tinder bio than you.
Social media in general has proved the perfect place
to mercilessly take the mickey out of some of the more amusing mishearings.
Linguist Geoffrey Pullum coined the term eggcorn
to describe these idiosyncratic substitutions
after a woman famously said “eggcorn” when she meant “acorn”.
This name stuck,
and has since spawned many a listicle of people’s favourite examples,
from the fairly logical damp squid
for damp squib – squib being now a little-known word for a firework –
to the cringeworthy
all intensive purposes for all intents and purposes.
While eggcorns can be great fun,
nothing brings people together like a misheard line or lyric.
Since the 1950s
these have been known as mondegreens
after American writer Sylvia Wright
described mishearing a line from a poem
“Laid him on the green”
as “Lady Mondegreen”.
Even Taylor Swift isn’t immune to a mondegreen,
with listeners widely hearing, “Long list of ex-lovers”
in Blank Space as,
“Lonely Starbucks lovers”.
Another lol-worthy linguistic muddle up
is the malaphor –
a blend of malapropism
the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one,
and metaphor.
A malaphor is a mixed up idiom.
For example, “It’s not rocket surgery”
or “It’ll be a walk in the cake.”
So next time you’re at a party and you say
“We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it,”
“The cows came home to roost,”
or “Every cloud has a silver spoon in its mouth,” remember,
you’re not making a mistake
you’re contributing to the evolution of the English language.
You’re basically Shakespeare, and one of these days your mistake
might just end up in the English dictionary.
What’s your most embarrassing malaphor or eggcorn?
