King of Malapropisms

photo courtesy of Kimberlee Hewitt

Hitting the one year anniversary of this blog has caused me to reassess what topics I might want to write about, bitch. Something that happened at work a couple of weeks ago, when I started the draft of this blog entry, was resonating with me then, but has now faded for the most part. What the hay, I’m sharing it anyway.

Here's the pitch. We all use clichés, idioms, proverbs, phrases and over-utilized words all day long without giving them a second thought. And I don’t know about you, but I also hear malapropisms on a regular basis too (as in the sentence “I was being very ‘pacific’ when I gave him directions to the cafeteria”). I just thought it would be fun to keep track of these somehow, thus the link to the right that says “new blog idea”. I’m over it now but figured I’d leave the new blog out there in cyberspace for the moment while I wax prolific. See, that’s what I’m talking about. Who waxes anything but prolific unless it’s their new car? And why do we use that phrase so much? It’s similar to: “he’s an avid reader”. We rarely do anything avidly other than read, right?

But anyway, it all started at work recently, when a flood of idioms rolled off of my tongue in a short time span. It made me curious about the origin of these old sayings that have become so commonplace in our speech. When I googled some of the phrases, I discovered there are books published, “pacifically” for people trying to learn English, that explain the meaning of everything from “the cat’s out of the bag” to “bury the hatchet. And I love it when someone uses one I haven't heard in a while, or better yet, when this here Yankee comes across one I've never heard before - this happened all of the time when I first moved into the bible belt and below the Mason-Dixon Line. Take for example this proverb: “don’t try to teach your grandma to suck eggs”. This means that you shouldn’t try to teach anyone who knows more than you. But come on, how was I supposed to know that? Have you really ever heard that one before? Come visit for a spell and you just might.

Here’s the work incident. I got called into the director’s office and I wasn’t told why. I've been in this job for a year and a half, have never once been in the director’s office, and have certainly never been summoned there. My mind went into a rambling stream of idioms that went something like this: “I wonder why I’m being called on the carpet? Am I going to get my feet held to the fire? I guess I better get ready to face the music”. I was happy to learn that I just needed to sign some paperwork so it ended up being "no skin off my teeth".

In addition to hearing these phrases on a regular basis, I also read them in case files. You may not be aware that when psychological testing and/or mental status exams are done, proverbs are often used to determine a person’s ability to think abstractly. On one of my good days, I have difficulty explaining the meaning of some of the standard proverbs they ask the potentially disabled. In fact one of my former co-workers recently raised an excellent question: “as a disability reviewer, how many times must one see his/her own diagnoses in a psychological claim for disability before one can file his/her own claim?” Anyway, what the psychologist will usually ask is something like: “tell me what is meant by ‘what goes around comes around’ or ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’”. Could it be that first one means the Democrats will do well this November? And the second one might mean that a Barack Obama is worth more than a George Bush, a Dick Cheney and a Condoleezza Rice combined?

On that note, just remember that “one’s pen is mightier than one’s sword” but “one’s blog is not worth much except to one’s mother” ...