In the past, we've looked at some common sayings that most of us use in everyday speech, but many of us use them incorrectly. This may be because we mishear them, or maybe because they contain a word we've never heard of, or maybe they just make more sense to us. Whatever the reason (or dare we say, no matter what), these misnomers have permeated our everyday speech and in some cases have become even more popular than the original, correct sayings.
And guess what? There are a lot more where they came from, so today we're going to look at 10 more of them.
10. Mute point
If during an argument or debate someone makes a statement that is not relevant to the topic under discussion, it may be dismissed as silent . Or, if you want to be right, you would dismiss it as controversial issue , because it is the correct expression.
Term"silent point" - is an eggplant, which is a misheard word or phrase that sounds similar to the words it replaces and even retains its original meaning. The most popular eggplants can sometimes become more common than their correct counterparts, and this is mainly due to two reasons. First, eggplant still makes sense. Second, the original phrase contains an obsolete word that most people will be unfamiliar with.
Both reasons apply here. You can see why someone might think that an irrelevant point would be "muted" or muted. That said, the correct word "mut" has been around for a thousand years, since the Anglo-Saxons, but nowadays it is mostly used in legalese, so the average person won't encounter it very often in their everyday life.
9. Call on call
If you are ready to serve someone at any time, day or night, you can say that you are at their service errands However, some people may mistakenly believe that you are actually in their beckoning call .
The latter is another example of egg corn. In this context, the word "beck" makes some sense, as it means to use a gesture to attract someone's attention. However, the biggest problem with this idiom is that in the real world, the word "beck" is obsolete. It is a "fossil word," meaning that it has completely fallen out of use in modern English, but is still found in phrases and idioms.
In other words, it's unlikely that you'll ever use the word "beck" outside of the phrase "beck and call ", unless you're debating which album is better - Odelay or Mellow Gold .
8. Goat of Escape
Someone who takes the blame for something that wasn't really their fault is often called a goat. absolutions . The term comes from the English translation of the Old Testament. In Leviticus 16:8, Aaron takes two goats. While the first is immediately sacrificed, the other, which is the scapegoat, is sent into the wilderness bearing the sins of the Israelites so that it can be punished in their place.
Meanwhile,goat-escape — this is another scrambled egg, although in this particular case the correct and incorrect phrases mean the same thing. “Scape” is simply an old-fashioned way of saying “escape,” and if we want to be more pedantic, we can point out that the very the word "scapegoat" was a mistranslation of Hebrew into English. It originally read "Azazel," the name of a demon that was mistakenly translated as "ez ozel," meaning "the goat that goes away." This mistranslation was used for centuries. Both the Modern English Version and the American Standard Version of the Bible have now changed the name back to "Azazel," but the scapegoat isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
7. Without tape
If you managed to get out of the situation without any consequences, you can say that you got off with impunity , although many use the wrong alternative with impunity . Some use the second version because they may have heard it wrong, while others deliberately avoid the expression " unpunished" , fearing that it might be derogatory towards the Scots.
If you are one of them, you can rest easy. The proverb has nothing to do with either Scots or Scotch. In medieval England, a "scotch" was a tax defined in the Middle English Miscellany as "a fee for food or drink at a public meeting." It came from an even older Scandinavian word for "cattle," and anyone who managed to evade paying the tax was described as being exempt from punishment.
6. Chewing the bit
Someone who is fidgety or shows a lack of restraint can be described as "chomping at the bit" or, as the original proverb put it, "chomping at the bit." This is a situation where the incorrect idiom has become so widely used that even some dictionaries have begun to recognize it as an acceptable variation on the original.
The problem is that the verb “champion” is a fossilized word, meaning it’s mostly obsolete outside of its use in idioms and phrases. In this particular case, the saying “to chew the bit” is the only place you’re likely to hear this archaic word, which was used to describe the grinding of a horse’s teeth. The expression itself dates back to the early 19th century and comes from horse racing, where the bit was a piece of iron that was part of a bridle and was inserted into the horse’s mouth to control it.
Restless horses often chewed their bits, hence the expression, but even experts seem willing to accept the modern version, which uses the verb "to chew."
5. Say "peace"
Let's say you just had a fight with someone and told them everything that was on your mind. You just said their part or you said their world ?
This is the first one -tell me your piece , and not say your peace . A bit confusing, we know. You can probably see how the confusion arose because the two words are homophones—they are pronounced the same but have different meanings. Plus, there's a similar but unrelated idiom "hold your peace" , which means to keep quiet and keep your objections to yourself. We hear this expression in every wedding scene on TV, and one of them actually uses the word "peace" instead of "piece", which confuses the matter even more.
So if you want to speak out, then this is "piece", but if you intend to remain silent, then the right word is "peace". And we hope that everything will become clear.
4. Shoes
Here's one example that's a little more straightforward, even though we're again dealing with two homophones: shoo, as in shoe, and shoo, as in the verb meaning to scare something away by shouting and waving your arms. If we want to refer to someone or something as a guaranteed winner, we can call them past or , May be, past .
In this particular case, the second spelling is simply incorrect. Some people might think it refers to something fitting, as well as a foot in a shoe, which makes it a pretty good scrambled egg because it not only sounds like the original saying, but also retains some of the meaning.
The correct version, however, is this shoo-in using the verb "shoo". This idiom dates back to the 1930s and again comes from horse racing. Back then, when jockeys called races, they would rein in their horses and "shoo" the winner in the final stretch. Thus, shu-in referred to someone who was guaranteed to come out on top, although it also had a connotation of fraud or dishonesty that no longer exists today.
3. Blow up the coffin
Just to be clear, if you have a leaf blower, a coffin, and some free time, you can literally blow up a coffin. However, you can't metaphorically blow up a coffin, i.e. lose your temper and react violently, because the correct expression is blow up. gasket .
In this case, it's a little odd that the misnomer is so common, since true-stable misnomers are those that either retain the original meaning or are meaningful in their own right. In this case, a blown coffin is pretty meaningless, while a blown gasket is a relatively common engine problem.
The confusion probably stems from the fact that many non-mechanics don't know the word "gasket," which is a piece of rubber or other soft material inserted into a joint to prevent fluid from leaking. When a gasket fails, the effect is usually immediate and violent, so the saying makes sense, but those unfamiliar with it simply substituted a similar word they'd heard of, and that's how they blew up. coffin .
2. Tongue and cheek
If you say something humorous or sarcastic but mean it seriously, you can say that you are were being ironic . But make sure that if you use this expression, you put your tongue firmly in your cheek, because if you say tongue and cheek , as many people do, you simply list body parts.
Switching the "in" to "and" seems like a fairly simple and minor mistake, but the expression only makes sense if the tongue is in the cheek, as this is what people physically did to show sarcasm or humor in their statement. In fact, it was originally meant to show contempt for another person. The practice appears in Tobias Smollett's 1748 novelAdventures Roderick Random" , where the protagonist demonstrates his disdain for a cowardly passenger by "sticking his tongue into [his] cheek, which humiliated him so much that he hardly swore another oath out loud during the entire journey."
Over the decades, the meaning of the physical act changed, and by the mid-19th century, the phrase had entered various poems and novels with a modern twist.
1. For all intensive purposes
We'll finish today's list by looking at the expression for all intents and purposes , meaning "for all practical purposes," which is too often misused for all intensive purposes .
The correct expression is almost 500 years old, dating back to an Act of Parliament in Britain that gave King Henry VIII the power to interpret laws “to all intents, constructions, and purposes.” The British seemed to like the phrase, so they kept using it, mostly in legal documents, although for some reason they dropped the “construction” part. Then, when the expression came to America, it was changed again to “to all intents and purposes” instead of “for all purposes.”
The "all-intensive-purpose" version of egg corn is much younger than this, although the earliest recorded examples still date back to the 1870s, so this is one error that has been around for a while and probably won't go away anytime soon.
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