by Jennie Ruby
A co-worker of mine one morning at a staff meeting said, "It's time to wake up and smell the roses." With all the coffee in the room at the time, I could not believe he said the wrong word. But later I realized his version of the saying had a certain beauty. He had mixed, of course, the saying "Wake up and smell the coffee" with "Don't forget to stop and smell the roses." His mixed version had us smelling the roses first thing in the morning: not a bad idea.
A mixed metaphor is where we mix up the words of a familiar saying or cliché. I find that sometimes these errors start as a joke, then take hold. For example, my father used to say "that's half of one; six dozen of the other" instead of "that's six of one; half a dozen of the other." The saying is supposed to mean that two choices are the same: both mean 6. His joke mixes the half and the six, making the two choices 1/2 versus 72, and the joke is that almost no one notices that it is backwards. I have repeated his joke so often that I rarely say this correctly.
Something like this may have happened in the office of a reader whose colleagues often say they are having a meeting to "flush out some ideas." My theory is that some colleague years ago said "flush out" the ideas as a joke, as if you have to beat the bushes to scare the ideas into the open. My question is what are they doing in these meetings: brainstorming for new ideas--which could seem like "flushing them out"--or starting with a bare-bones outline and fleshing it out? If the former, then the play on words of saying "flush them out" instead of "flesh them out" is actually kind of clever and apt, although it is now getting old because everyone says it. If they are actually filling out an outline, then they are in fact wrong.
This also reminds me of when a friend accidentally said: "They're going to run slipshod over you." The "correct" saying is "They are going to run roughshod over you," which means ride over you on a horse shod with steel spikes. The meaning is that they are going to cause you significant harm. The accidental play on words has "slipshod"--to do shoddy or poor workmanship--which has a kind of aptness if what you mean is that their incompetence and shoddiness is going to harm you.
Instead of always seeing these mistakes as negative, maybe we should recognize their sometimes strange beauty, and smell the roses.
About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Essentials of Access 2000" and "Editing with MS Word 2003 and Adobe Acrobat 7" to her credit. Jennie specializes in electronic editing. At the American Psychological Association, she was manager of electronic publishing and manager of technical editing and journal production. Jennie has an M.A. from George Washington University and is a Certified Technical Trainer (Chauncey Group). She is a publishing professional with 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.
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