This article made me think of some mixed metaphors I have heard over the years:
Here are a couple:
“Cute as a buttonhole.”
“What keeps you asleep at night?”
Please add ones you have heard over the years.
This article made me think of some mixed metaphors I have heard over the years:
Here are a couple:
“Cute as a buttonhole.”
“What keeps you asleep at night?”
Please add ones you have heard over the years.
I often have to Google to make sure I have it right. I used “to each their own” the other day. I think, in my mind, it was “to each is own” but needed to check to make sure.
This is how “off” I am - my entire life until a few weeks ago I thought I had been using the phrase “cold as hell!” correctly. Apparently, the phrase is actually “cold as hail” which makes much more sense now that I actually think about it. Not exactly a mixed metaphor, more like just wrong.
In the South those two phrases sound exactly the same!
And I didn’t know that either.
These aren’t mixed but still annoying:
Far from the madding crowd (not maddening)
For all intents and purposes (not intensive)
All that glisters is not gold (not glitters)
Oh so many more, though.
“I had a pit in my stomach.” No, you had a feeling in the pit of your stomach.
“It played a factor.” No, it was a factor or it played a part.
“I could care less.”
No, really you COULDN’T care less. As in it is impossible for you to care less about something, so you couldn’t care less.
I thought mixed metaphors were like you can take a horse to water but you can’t put it through a square hole. ![]()
Or is that a mixed idiom?
A mixed metaphor occurs when two different metaphors are used inappropriately together, as in:
Every cloud has a silver spoon.
You could see from the writing on the wall that it wasn’t a level playing field
When the going gets tough, the early bird catches the worm.
Too many cooks break the camel’s back.
And so on. What we’ve been posting are misused metaphors.
Fine to post whatever people want. Either mixed or misused metaphors.
calling Yogi Berra fans!
OMG, THANK YOU!!!
I’ve often felt that my head threatening to explode when someone says (or writes, which is even worse) “I had a pit in my stomach”, when they were filled with dread. I mean, did you swallow an entire peach or something?
From a coworker: “we need to nip it in the butt”.
I would have assumed I misheard, but she wrote this in an email so there was no mistaking it.
And it’s buck naked not butt naked.
how about “I wouldn’t step foot” instead of “I wouldn’t set foot”?
Yes, but butt naked is so much more descriptive! ![]()
Before my vegetarian DH changed our family to saying “feeding two birds with one scone,” I used to like to say “kill two birds in a bush with one stone.”
My (ESL) dad used to say, “Never look in a horse’s mouth.” He grew up on a farm so, to him, that seemed wise advice.
I used to work with someone who used to always say “mute point”. Drove me bananas, wanted to scream out, “it’s MOOT point, MOOT point!!!”
Not sure what you’d call that, a mispronunciation, malapropism,…
That was one of my DH’s pet peeves. He had a colleague who just couldn’t unlearn that one.