Oh, My Rats!

dead metaphors are really interesting honestly and specifically i’m interested in when they become malapropisms

like, the concept being, people are familiar with the phrase and what people use it to mean metaphorically, but it’s not common knowledge anymore what the metaphor was in literal reference to. people still say “toe the line” but don’t necessarily conjure up the image of people standing at the starting line of a race, forbidden from crossing over it. people still say “the cat is out of the bag” without necessarily knowing it’s a sailors’ expression referring to a whip being brought out for punishment. some metaphors are so dead we don’t even know where they come from; like, there are ideas about what “by hook or by crook” references, but no one is entirely sure. nobody knows what the whole nine yards are.

and then you throw in a malaprop or a mondegreen or two, where because people don’t know what the actual words of the expression refer to, they’re liable to replace them with similar sounding words (see “lack toast and tolerant”). so we can literally go from a phrase referencing a common, everyday part of life to a set of unfixed, contextless sounds with a completely different meaning. that’s fascinating. what an interesting piece of the way language and culture are living, changing, coevolving things.

maybe part of the reason we can’t figure out where some phrases come from is that over time the words themselves have changed! one of the theories about “the whole nine yards” is that it’s a variant of “the whole ball of wax,” which some people further theorize was originally “the whole bailiwick,” meaning just “the whole area”! the addition of “nine yards” might be related to “dressed to the nines,” which might reference the fucking Greek muses! language is so weird and cool! (and I only know any idioms in two languages!)

the point is. I just came across the words “nip it in the butt” in a piece of published, professional fiction, and now I can’t stop giggling.

in honor of ace week id like to shoutout every asexual who first thought they were bi/pan because they looked at all the genders and felt no difference and zero is equal to zero so they said "huh. must be bisexual" and then shoved their sexuality back under the rug for 3-5 years

Love that in a lot of classic literature people just “randomly” fall ill but bro their homes were stacked to the roof with arsenic and asbestos and lead and radium of course they were sick all the time.

Pretty

there is a demon in your house named CARBON MONOXIDE. he enchants your mind with confusion and your body with exhaustion. you need to call a powerful exorcist named HVAC TECHNICIAN

Two halves of one whole haircut

Marcel Proust, from a letter featured in The Selected Letters of Marcel Proust

Magical stained glass

It's always sooooo funny when English people or Americans are like "Why are Irish names so hard to pronounce?? Why are these Welsh words so insane???" that's because it is a different language that you do not speak hope this helps ❤️