Mike Colias has an enjoyable WSJ column (archived) about a Ford executive who “kept a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered in meetings over a decade”:
Mike O’Brien emailed a few hundred colleagues last month to announce his retirement after 32 years at Ford Motor. The sales executive’s note included the obligatory career reflections and thank yous—but came with a twist. Attached to the email was a spreadsheet detailing a few thousand violations committed by his co-workers over the years.
During a 2019 sales meeting to discuss a new vehicle launch, a colleague blurted out: “Let’s not reinvent the ocean.” At another meeting, in 2016, someone started a sentence with: “I don’t want to sound like a broken drum here, but…”
For more than a decade, O’Brien kept a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered in Ford meetings, from companywide gatherings to side conversations. It documents 2,229 linguistic breaches, including the exact quote, context, name of the perpetrator and color commentary. After one colleague declared: “It’s a huge task, but we’re trying to get our arms and legs around it,” O’Brien quipped: “Adding ‘legs’ into the mix makes it sound kinda kinky.” […]
Eventually, O’Brien filled six whiteboards with the linguistic flubs, scrawled tightly together in a mishmash of colors. Colleagues would occasionally pop into his office and laugh at the latest. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and everyone had to clear out for lockdown, O’Brien moved the whiteboards to his garage.
The spreadsheet is the more-detailed repository of the data (not “suppository” of the data, a particularly unfortunate case of word-misuse that made the board. Twice). It breaks out the examples into categories that include:
• Sports/Exercise-related: “We’re really low on money right now…we’re dancing on thin ice,” and, “We need to keep running in our swim lanes.” Also, this mixed metaphor: “I know these are swing-for-the-moon opportunities, but I think we should pursue them.”
• Body parts: “We need to make sure dealers have some skin in the teeth;” and “It’s no skin on our back,” to which O’Brien appended that it sounded like “a horrible medical condition.”
• Food-related: “Too many cooks in the soup.” And: “Read between the tea leaves.”
• Animals (the largest category, with 80 entries): “I’m not trying to beat a dead horse to death.” Another: “We need to talk about the elephant in the closet,” one person said.
[…] There are many repeat violators. O’Brien himself is among them with 110 Board Word offenses, ranking him No. 3 on the list. (Those were all flagged by his peers: there is a rule against self-reporting).
Some “violators” complained, and their entries were anonymized. While I don’t in general approve of policing other people’s speech, I admit this gave me a lot of pleasure. I hope nobody gets their duck up about it!
Some of those sound clever and witty if you can pass them off as having been done on purpose. Like “read between the tea leaves” – okay, not the original expression, but I can see it. Or “elephant in the closet”, like… somebody thinks they’re successfully hiding their sexual orientation but they’re really not?
“I don’t want to sound like a broken drum here, but…” my player piano rolls are not at all happy.
Load and rewind roll
Some of those sound clever and witty if you can pass them off as having been done on purpose.
I agree!
Some of those sound clever and witty if you can pass them off as having been done on purpose.
I’ve been distorting fixed expressions for decades. I try to find new sense by shuffling word order and replacing words in fixed expressions, while maintaining a skeletal syntax. The new sense must be striking and unexpected. Whether the manipulations come across as clever or witty is unimportant. They’re just attention hooks.
The point is to make sneaky, memorable new sense – grabbing attention with imperfect similarity. ALL CAPS is not sneaky, though it does grab attention for a moment.
This is a minor league version of what Luhmann did astonishingly often – presenting arguments in such a way that the conclusion is the opposite of what is commonly believed.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with dicking around for laffs. A lot of the time that’s how it starts.
I’m still trying to get “bei Haken oder Kraken” to catch on.
Cute. But the potential fangroup is small. Anglophones won’t get it unless they know enough German to know Krake (a cousin of the cuddlefish). Germans won’t get it unless they happen to know “by hook or crook”.
Also I would suggest “mit“. “bei” can mean various things in various contexts, but “by” (in the sense of “by means of”, “with the aid of”) is not among those things. Well, except possibly in the somewhat antiquated “bei Gott!“. As a German speaker I find “bei” distracting here.
Anglophones do seem to be increasingly familiar with the English word “kraken”.
Eine Krake (Ger) is not a kraken (Norw) = “a gigantic tentacled sea monster of Scandinavian myth”. A cookie is not a cookie monster – although when you know the one, you are not surprised when you learn the other.
The most famous of Bertie Ahern’s many verbal innovations is probably “Smoke and Daggers”, later the title of Hugh Costello’s satire set in Ahern’s Celtic Tiger pomp
Kudos to O’Brien for taking off the kid’s gloves and grabbing the bull by the teeth.
Australia’s former prime minister Tony Abbott was famous for saying “no-one is the suppository of all wisdom.”
By the way, Abbott was PM 2013 to 2015. His co-partyist Peter Costello was treasurer in John Howard’s government 1996 to 2007.
It is a matter of eternal sorrow to me that we so narrowly (in geological time) missed out on having Abbott and Costello as a PM-treasurer team. Maybe in some alternative universe….
@Stu Clayton: Yeah, I actually usually say “mit”—not sure why I wrote “bei” there.
@Keith Ivey: The rhyming German pronunciation of “Kraken” is a bit more opaque, to Americans, at least.
The Kraken Wakes is my favourite John Wyndham novel.
Title taken (as all Hatters will know) from
https://poets.org/poem/kraken
Do all Hattics know that the poem has fifteen lines? (It is sometimes described as “an irregular sonnet.”)
I did wonder where the title is taken from when I read The Kraken Wakes* in middle grades of school.
*Ili tochneye «Kráken probuzhdáyetsya» Dzhóna Ooéendema.
P.S. I also wondered what on Earth is “kraken”. Of course if I knew the word is Norwegian…
My wife sometimes mangles common expressions, eg “It made my teeth stand on end”.
Her best one was when we were out walking with some friends and their daughter, just out of nappies/diapers. At one point the little girl said “I’ve wet myself”. My wife said “Well, you’ll just have to bear and grin it” – and turned red when she realised what she had said.
Do all Hattics know that the poem has fifteen lines?
I must admit that I didn’t even know the poem until now.
It’s a super boring poem. Plot: a big octopus sleeps in dramatic surroundings, then dies in dramatic circumstances. It never does a damn thing. I mean, c’mon Alfie, you can do better than that.
@Jon: “It made my teeth stand on end”
Thanx, I’ve added that to my box of tricks.
c’mon Alfie, is it just for the moment the kraken lives?
It’s a super boring poem
True, but you have to give some credit to a poet who can come up with the line Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Didn’t know the poem* either, though I probably knew about it in some vague way.
* Definitely a monosyllable for Tennyson. Everything else is a monosyllable for him! Many a is two syllables!
Or Log Cabin Republicans.
To pile on: bei exclusively means “chez“, “by” as in “by my side”. I would even say such things as ich schwöre bei Gott* imply “I swear while standing next to God who is my witness”.
* A common phrase, apparently, in low-church Islam over here.
Also ein Krake, just to be difficult.
Das schlägt dem Fass die Krone ins Gesicht.
das schlägt dem Fass den Boden aus “this smashes the bottom out of the barrel” + das setzt […] die Krone auf “this puts the crown on […]” + das schlägt […] ins Gesicht “this hits […] in the face”, all three meaning “this surpasses everything, in a bad way”.
(Or, as Stephen Colbert once put it, I think in late 2018: “The Republicans hit rock bottom months ago, but never fear! They’re bringing out the blasting caps and are fracking America’s moral bedrock.”)
Also ein Krake, just to be difficult.
I have gotten the impression that this OTONEH-OTOTHERH business is not such an issue in Spanish and French. oui ou merde?
I put the poem somewhere between “The Eagle” and “The Owl” among Tennyson’s animal verses.
It reminds me of Mitch Benn’s Devil and a Hard Place.
The comments section appears to have degenerated straight away into grammar peeves of the ‘would of’ kind, but the original list doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that or even the ‘intensive purposes’ type where the speaker has no idea that it’s wrong – they’re things that the speakers would have to admit were mistakes, caused by momentary absence of mind. And some mistakes are funny. Some of my mistakes are funny…
Indeed not, because they were standardized earlier, more thoroughly, and on much less broad bases. Standard French is descended pretty much exclusively from what the Parisian upper middle class spoke at the eve of the Revolution. Standard German started with what east-central bureaucrats wrote, then went through the Luther stage (carefully picked vocabulary to be understood as widely as possible), then Opitz, Adelung, Goethe, Schiller – all from quite different places, and it shows – who developed further compromises, and barely an attempt to develop a somewhat unified pronunciation for this written language until the 19th century.
The comments section appears to have degenerated straight away into grammar peeves of the ‘would of’ kind, but the original list doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that or even the ‘intensive purposes’ type where the speaker has no idea that it’s wrong – they’re things that the speakers would have to admit were mistakes, caused by momentary absence of mind.
Exactly.
@dm
I believe there are two things going on with “by God”; with oaths there is, as you say “as God is my witness”; with curses there is a (desired) binding of God (or “all that’s holy”, etc.) to the curse to make it more effective (maybe this is also present in oaths that promise future action of any sort).
Just backing up to the title of the post, it should seem obvious that there is an optimal and probably quite low number of cooks to have in the soup at any given moment, such that having *more* cooks than that optimal number in the soup is definitely contraindicated, such that in turn having a proverb building on that insight is not particularly crazy or, except by fortuity, unidiomatic.
Don’t let it get up your goat.
@JWB:
This is obviously culture-dependent to some extent. The Kusaasi traditionally regard the optimal number as zero, and this seems to be widespread in the cultural zone. As the Hausa proverb goes:
Wanzami ba ya son jarfa.
“The tattooist does not want to be tattooed.”
@David E.: Zero would certainly meet my proposed criterion of “quite low number.”
ETA: Although I will admit that “too many cooks” may carry some implicature in ordinary idiomatic English that the optimal number is a positive integer. Although that’s a <100%-confidence native-speaker intuition. More research needed?
“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
Speaking of tea towels,
Too many cooks soil the cloth.
Uma azeitona, ouro, segunda prata, terceira mata.
I once heard a Hartford, Connecticut, city councilman say “You wash my hand, I’ll wash yours.”
if only the macbeths had thought of that! (yesterday and yesterday and yesterday / creeps in this petty pace, and so on)
Too Many Cooks, a “surreal comedy horror short,” is not to all tastes, but it is very much to mine, and I recommend it to those with a twisted sense of humor, an affection for the style of old sitcoms, and a tolerance for an infinitely repeated theme song. YouTube, if you dare.
That’s where the polysemy of swear comes in: fuck, but you are stupid = by God, you are stupid = “I’ve never seen such stupidity before, I swear by God”…
German schwören is entirely restricted to taking oaths. Swearwords are Schimpfwörter, “scolding words”.
“Those who sell candy don’t care for candy.”
Or Flüche, as German fluchen covers both “cursing” and “swearing”.
a twisted sense of humor
Did I spot Lars von Trier in the credits?
not to all tastes,
Indeed. I don’t think I’d have persisted to the end, but for your errm recommendation(?)
Don’t say you weren’t warned!
I also love Trier’s The Kingdom, if that helps anyone calibrate. (I don’t call him “von Trier” because he added the “von” himself for shits and giggles.)
The Kingdom is indeed very much worth watching. (Trier’s own bookending spots are the best part. I love the way they combine the banal with the indefinably sinister.)
“You wash my hand, I’ll wash yours.”
No doubt a confusion with the Kusaal proverb with the same implication:
Ku’om zɔtnɛ bian’ar zug.
“Water runs over mud.”
It’s only a clarification of whose hands are involved in manus manum lavat. Those Romans left too much to context for modern tastes.
Ils ont une culture à contexte élevé ces romains!
@hat
Germans have Kultur, French (and one presumes, Romans) have civilisation.
There is a joke about the English ribbing the French about one of their ministries with the replique being that the English have a Ministry of Culture (or vice-versa).
lars bei trier? lars ab trier? lars nach trier?
@rozele: Lars bei Trier would seem apposite
I don’t even remember when that other Lars arrogated the von, it was before Forbrydelsens element. I thought there might be good tea on WP.da, but it looks like a close translation from .en (or vice versa). They intimate that film directors have form with it.
fluchen: yes, though cursing someone/something is verfluchen.