This week at Talladega NASCAR reporter Dave Burns, interviewing Dale Earnhardt, Jr., observed: "The championship wagon has already sailed this year without you on it."
My best friend in high school was the queen of mixed-metaphors and misunderstood idioms. My favorite--and I kid you not--was a triple-threat combo to cut our woefully incompetent shared lab partner: "She's not the sharpest crayon in the jar." My inability to speak for laughing always brought the reply, "Whatever, you know what I mean."
I propose that you readers at home play a game with your friends and colleagues in which you compete for the best combination, for example: "you can beat a dead horse in the mouth, but you can't get him to drink his own medicine."
As a side note: the misheard song lyrics game is also good for a laugh. Recent examples:
"Take me down to the prairie dog city..."
"Amstel light! Enter ni--ight!"
I hope you are playing, because it's more fun than a barrel full of monkeys with their heads cut off.
In case you needed some more to get you going:
“I'm shooting from the seat of my pants”
“It takes a mountain to move a molehill”
“That's like the cart calling the horse black” (as a friend commented, there is a whole racial-Marxist reading begged for here)
More from the world of sports commentary: (this is the best place to catch mixedmetaphors, I find):
“Once again, the Achilles' heel of the Philadelphia Eagles' defense has reared its ugly head.”
for some reason, this reminded me of the salon business' spectacular ability to wrangle “hair” into the most inappropriate of places.
i think it stems, as in the case of the sports metaphors, from the blue collar taste for an economy of phrase and some weirdo flipside-of-the-same-coin desire to speak mythologically about the mundane.
all madden wants to do is tell you that the eagles defense, while heroically competent otherwise, has a tragic failing. the metaphors provide building blocks for him to do that with a kind of accelerated brilliance. it gets the job done and we know it's a metaphor. plus it sounds better than, “once again, the eagles' pass rush has proven to be the least effective element of their otherwise invulnerable defense.”
all i really wanted to say is it seems the same desire that produces “crazy as a rat on a hot tin roof,” has given us the establishment known as “hairacy”. i mean, how much better is that than “barbershop” or “salon”? a dye job at hairacy isn't just rad, it's a big middle finger in the face of god himself.
then there's the plain nonsense ones where it's just “hair” replacing the first syllable of a word. sometimes that word has to do with hair but the better ones are seemingly random. “hair-splosion” for example. or “hair-gasm”.
there's a subset of these where hair doesn't replace any part of a word but simply precedes it, “hair attack” and so on. these are funny for the same reason that “bob genghis khan” is funny in bill and ted's excellent adventure.
i also like the name based subset such as the “hairy caray” barbershop in chicago. they make for another fun game.
you know you'd get your hair cut at a place called “hairmann goering”.
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