I know these as eggcorns thanks to Adam & Joe... https://youtu.be/GyAWSnwBJLA?si=UXqG273L2lOxk05h
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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It's not rocket surgery.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater else you'll end up with a wet, critically injured baby.
Current pet peeve: "to step foot on". Facepalm! Just coz somebody misheard "set" doesn't make "step foot" grammatical. And yet here we are.
It's often called an eggcorn, and here's a really good video that touches on it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JTslqcXsFd4&pp=ygUMRWdnY29ybiBlcmlr
The weirdest one I used to hear often was "for all intensive purposes," like wtf is an intensive purpose?
"It's not rocket surgery."
This one irks me. Combination of "rocket scientist" and "brain surgery".
It's just people combining "it's not rocket science" and "it's not brain surgery". Just like the pope one.
"Does a bear shit in the woods" and "it's not Pope surgery"?
Yes, that's exactly what I thought I had implied.
Nothing holds a bar to this as being my favorites, but I generally don’t pay much mind to idioms—they’re all water under a duck’s back.
I'm personally a fan of "it's not rocket appliances"
A malapropism? Does that apply? 🤔
That's like if you said "mute point" instead of "moot point."
You know, a cow's opinion
moo point.
you know, the kind of thing a cow would say.
Like a cow's opinion. It doesn't matter.
How you mooin'? 😎
So, lots of examples, but not much on your question about terminology. In looking around a bit, I couldn't find a single specific term for a malapropism that "sticks," but you could fairly describe it as a form semantic drift driven by catachresis, thought the latter seems more common in literary criticism or philosophy than in linguistics.
catachresis
Ha! Here you are answering the actual question but nobody cares!
Amazing. I had never seen this word before.
Even then, I can't quite find a single Linguistics term for this phenomenon, where it becomes a thing of its own or even replaces the original. 'Eggcorn' and 'Malaphor' seem to be pretty decent casual terms.
Almost thought you'd done one yourself there with this "even then"! But I was thinking of even still (from even so). Which BTW is probably in my top 3 most hated malaphors or catachreses or whatever they are.
I don't know about the "becomes commonplace" part, but mangled idioms are generally called "malapropisms".
When referring to a difficult task: "That's a tough road to hold", or "a tough road to hoe", or "a tough road to [travel on]" or "a tough road to... [trails off awkwardly...]", or just "a tough road".
It's a tough row to hoe.
It's an agricultural metaphor. The row is a line of dirt in a field where you plant seeds. You use a hoe to dig the lines, remove weeds, and create little holes where you drop the seeds. Hoeing may be difficult if the soil is too hard or too full of rocks and weeds. Such a row would be a tough one to hoe.
I understand how you got there, but it sounds like a tough hoe to plow.
I thought most hoes would be quite easy to plow
All the more reason to emphasize the tough ones!
Also, have you SEEN inflation lately?!?!?
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