Saturday, February 2, 2008

Metaphors be with you!

I am reminded that mixed metaphors are now referred to as malaphors. That's an apt term, considering that it is in itself portmanteau for metaphor and malapropism. However, I tend to think that mixed metaphors would result from inadvertently mixing two perfectly distinct metaphorical expressions which have a certain term in common. On the other hand, a malaphor would be the result of committing malapropism in citing a metaphor. The bridge example I gave in the previous post is a perfect illustration of a mixed metaphor. A former participant to the old Wordplay list has supplied with me with a collection of malaphors he amassed over the years. Here are some of them:

I'm going to have to stay on the eyeball.
That is mundane to the topic at hand
We don't want to jump the gun too early.
I don't want to misspeak out of turn.
We're over inundating them with information
We need to appraise him of the fact
These figures personify a major mega-trend of enormous growth
We'll flush out the details later.
They'll give us feedback back.
The machine was misconfigured incorrectly
The circuits need to be trouble-shat.

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