Like “does the Pope shit in the woods?” or “that train has sailed?”
Also, what good examples can you think of?
I thought “cakewalk” was a clever American amalgamation of “a piece of cake” and “a walk in the park”.
Turns out it’s actually related to slavery, so probably doesn’t count.
It’s not rocket surgery.
I always liked “Hindsight is 50/50”
“Not the brightest cookie in the crayon box” is an amalgamation of 3 different sayings I’ve been trying to make happen. It won’t happen.
I used to say not the sharpest cookie in the jar
My mom was fond of “Not the brightest egg in the drawer”.
I do it in danish, but we have the idiom here too. I’ll often make up a new one following the not the x y in the z template. E.g. Not the loudest spoon in the forest.
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?
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 know these as eggcorns thanks to Adam & Joe… https://youtu.be/GyAWSnwBJLA?si=UXqG273L2lOxk05h
“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.
Yes, that’s exactly what I thought I had implied.
“Does a bear shit in the woods” and “it’s not Pope surgery”?
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”
I don’t know about the “becomes commonplace” part, but mangled idioms are generally called “malapropisms”.
Does a bear shit in the Pope’s hat?
- The grass is always greener in the hand.
- You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t look it in its mouth.
- We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.
- Caught with his pants in the cookie jar.
That last one… goddamn, that’s amazing.
I’m running around like a chicken with its legs cut off.
Reminds me of my friend once saying that “the discussion leads nowhere. It’s like the snake biting its tongue”
A malapropism? Does that apply? 🤔
That’s like if you said “mute point” instead of “moot point.”
moo point.
you know, the kind of thing a cow would say.
How you mooin’? 😎
Like a cow’s opinion. It doesn’t matter.
You know, a cow’s opinion
