Some time ago, in a syndicated article (“The return of the mondegreens,” Victoria Times-Colonist, Saturday, February 19, 1994), William Safire mused about certain noteworthy linguistic mishearings called mondegreens. The word was coined by American journalist Sylvia Wright in the 1950s, who claimed to have misheard all her life the line in the Scottish ballad The Bonny Earl of Murray: “They hae slain the Earl of Murray / And laid him on the green.” She had thought that the Lady Mondegreen accompanies the unfortunate earl to his death (a love tryst, no doubt). This is all very well, and it reminds me of that game we played at the kitchen table in our youth (when families ate meals together and found amusing ways to pass the time), when we whispered messages from ear to ear to see what delightful distortions would be wrought. The word mondegreen is amusing. As for Safire’s article on the subject, it distorts the message. The article is not in the least about cute mishearings but very singular instances of metaphorical corruption quite revealing of our relationship with the language.
Safire, as you know, is an almost uniquely American institution, a good-natured pedant who makes his living by writing journalism on the quiddities of language. For the most part, this kind of pedantry comes across as being stuffy and fogeyish. Writers like Safire get away with it because their pedantry is of the descriptive rather than the prescriptive sort, and they tend to take the view that language is a fluid thing. Even Safire, if subjected to the penetrating scrutinies of psychoanalysis, would probably admit to a certain degree of stuffiness when it comes to English usage. It’s simply that his critical distance from the matter comes with an appealing smile and a nudge and a wink to the effect of: Aren’t the absurdities of our language endearing?
A week later, in the letters column of the Times-Colonist, someone agreed: “Imagine! The mondegreen!” Will wonders never cease? I must hasten to defend myself here: I am not a regular reader of the letters column of the Times-Colonist. I read the column that week to see if they had printed my letter on the mondegreen. After a week of sounding public opinion on national politics, civic affairs, the Island Highway, Clayoquot Sound, I had the usual Joycean epiphany: “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” And so on. Of course, Safire isn’t an academic writer on language, so he isn’t a real pedant. Safire is to language what Carl Sagan is to physics. Safire is a popularizer of language, and we shouldn’t hold that against him. After all, language has become terribly unpopular, and I think it has an undeservedly poor reputation. Even so, the linguistic phenomenon Safire popularizes in “The return of the Mondegreens” is not the mondegreen.
The article originally attracted my attention in light of a syndicated column I had seen on the same page some week or ten days earlier. The columnist, whose name escapes me, writes for the Boston Globe. I can’t remember what her subject was, but she purported to hone in on it. My wife and I had discussed that very morning instances of metaphors so dead that the referent has been lost. I cited to toe the line, which is now known as to tow the line, and to home in on, which the columnist from Boston knows as to hone in on. My wife had never heard of the latter, and when she saw it in the paper she guffawed. At work (I teach English... I know. You’re thinking, he is a real pedant), one of my colleagues suggested for all intensive purposes. As it happens, Safire’s principal example is the phrase to all intents and purposes, misheard as to all intensive purposes. The subject of dead, buried, and badly disinterred metaphors is closely related to what Safire calls the “unwitting paronomasia,” or the mondegreen, but Safire doesn’t even mention the metaphorical innovation so central to his example. And this was what piqued my curiosity - or perhaps I should say peaked my curiosity, lifted, as it was, from its lowly career to an apex. (I remember many years ago reading a headline in the Vancouver Sun - something like, “A Peak at this Week’s Entertainment Highlights” - and searching the accompanying article in vain for mountain imagery; it never occurred to me that the author intended, perhaps, “A Pique at this Week’s Entertainment Highlights.”). The reason people now say to tow the line is that it makes a kind of sense. The metaphor now means something like to pull your weight, as in, "It’s high time you towed the line". Only in the hands of stale traditionalists does it mean what it used to mean, to be precise, like a soldier, in the observance of authority. To home in on had its intents and purposes in the days of homing pigeons and other such devices, but now we are much more inclined to get to the point. How better to get there than by sharpening? Taken out of historical context, intents and purposes, a sixteenth-century legal redundancy, makes little sense, for it says the same thing twice. It is therefore not surprising that it has been mistaken.
My point is that, while some things are simply misheard - the donzerly light in the American national anthem, for example - other things have been heard reasonably well and not understood. I don’t think that those who say to tow the line have misheard the expression; they have simply misunderstood it. In the cases of misprised expressions, such as to home in on and to all intensive purposes, people have heard them, not understood them, and changed them to protect the innocent (themselves). Intensive purposes sounds impressive. It is not very meaningful, but no doubt it means more to most than intents and purposes. It draws its existence from intents and purposes, clearly, but in such a mangled form that it looks as if the corpse’s skeleton had been rebuilt, and so it is perhaps appropriate to call it and like expressions, as I have already done, disinterred metaphors.
Most disinterred metaphors have assumed the proportions of folklore. They reflect a common struggle with the language, felt by all speakers of the language. They are so frequent in their appearance that it is hard to imagine anyone being the first person to have used them. Nevertheless, in most cases someone, surely, must have invented them.
One of the highlights of being an English teacher is that I encounter occasional flashes of unwitting brilliancy in student writing: marking the English Composition Test at UBC one year, I came across “The ideal marriage consists of love and fondleness.” So, I imagine, with the disinterred metaphors of tomorrow. I keep imagining that I have found their beginnings. I keep finding new variations on an old theme. The problem is that I’m never quite sure whether the death and corruption of the metaphor haven’t already occurred on a wide scale, and whether I’m not getting the bones left over after the broth.
The other day, a colleague got exorcized over some issue or other; that is to say, he was thrown into a frenzy and saved from that frenzy by an external agency. I’m sure you have known the feeling. A friend, in the course of getting exorcized over the play of his favourite hockey team, announced that the coach was short shifting one of the team’s stars. Imagine the indignity of being given short shift. Come the next round of salary negotiations, how will shifts compare with schrifts? A student wrote that Coriolanus changes his tact in the middle of the play. Obviously someone from the Prairies, where they don’t sail as much as we do on the coast - a landlover - nobody knows what a lubber is anyway. Another student wrote that divorce is the root of upheaval. As a concept, it is true, evil lives in evil times; in the age of psychoanalysis, there is no evil, only upheaval. Still another wrote of being left on tender hooks. We all know that they are the hooks upon which meats are hung during the tenderizing process. The author of a Sunday Times of London article savoured the story of a mother whose letter to her son’s teacher asked him to forgive his absence from school the day before on the grounds that he had had dire rear; a.k.a. the bum’s rush. Perhaps (though not to judge from my experience) there are salespeople who give their clients the soft peddle. This is a particularly useful example (I had to coin it myself to use it). We have reached the point of no return when we realize that the verb to soft pedal has no meaning for us. I dare say that one or two of you would have to go to some trouble to reconstruct its meaning (and thus its utility). Are there some for whom it means the smooth and delicate way of proceeding evoked by the image of a soft petal? In a similar vein, does punch-drunk already stand for the guest who has double-dipped at the punch bowl? Am I cutting off my nose despite my face? How many expressions of this kind are already a part of the social lexicon? Perhaps there are some, as yet uncoined, ready-made for our use (as for example in the sentence, “By now, I’m sure, you must be thinking of me as some kind of a crank-pot eccentric.”).
How long have we been killing, burying, and disinterring our metaphors? A long time. The notorious Parthian shots of antiquity (the Parthians were wont to fire their arrows backwards over their shoulders as they retreated) were parting shots by the eighteenth century. In fact, we might even call this the exemplum classicus of the disinterred metaphor. There are many other historical examples. I was disconcerted recently to discover that many otherwise well-informed people believe the expression is to damn with faint praise. “It doesn’t make as much sense as feigned praise,” I said to one such person. Never one to be caught off guard, he cited the prologue to Wycherly’s The Plain Dealer and Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (line 201); he gave faint praise to my preference for feigned: it is better, he said. It is better precisely because the adjective feigned so readily combines with nouns to imply disingenuousness. To my relief, many others have feigned to praise in print, at least since the eighteenth century. The example is useful, for it illustrates how accessible to editorial change the language is. The close proximity in sound and meaning (and indeed in origin) of the words feigned, feint, and faint makes them prime candidates for substitution. The language is rich with words and expressions that have evolved subtly beyond their origins. I suppose we will have to grant that the disinterred metaphor is as native to the language as etymology.
Even so, the practice of clumsy, self-styled linguistic grave robbing appears to be on the increase. Our speakers are also coming up with many ambiguous expressions lying somewhere between the mondegreen and the disinterred metaphor. It is hard to say whether mitigate against, instead of militate against, isn’t simply a misguess between two similar-sounding words. My suspicion is that this expression is evidence of the speaker’s suspicion of metaphors generally: Why imply military associations where there are none? - Therefore, since I don’t know the meaning of mitigate and it doesn’t prejudice my meaning, why not plump for it? On route for en route (pronounced enn rowt in the United States) is a close call. The thin edge of the wedge for the thin end of the wedge is but a poetaster’s emendation.
I suppose it is arguable that all of the disinterred metaphors I am citing as examples are malapropisms. Malapropisms are as old as the language, and the speaker of malapropisms has been a fixture in our literature at least since Shakespeare. We tend to reserve the word malapropism for the comical expressions of stage buffoons (typified by Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals). Disinterred metaphors, on the contrary, are part of a social phenomenon. It seems unfair to credit any single person with their origin or character. Rather, the English-speaking world unthoughtfully accepts their distorted characteristics as being native to the language, idiomatic, quite proper. But, if they must be malapropisms, they are also much more. They are barometers of the language. They are portents of the rain and shine - the falling away of the old leaves and the arrival of new greeenery - or the blight of inarticulation - worst of all, the blight of thoughtless (or well-meaning but ignorant) inarticulation.
I think George Orwell was closer to the point than Safire when he wrote “Politics and the English Language,” for he saw that dead and corrupted metaphors revealed a language decayed, and a society in danger, unthoughtful of the implications of the most powerful instrument of its being - its language. Nevertheless, it is hard to make the case for the vigilant surveillance of language and metaphor without looking like a real pedant. I still cringe at those who think that the “m” in whom is for emphasis (is that “m”-phasis?). And I cringe at the “Nine items or less” in the supermarket. The express lane is strewn with broken metaphors to be shovelled hopefully as a homogenous mass - anyway, less than nine - into an environmentally safe bag. But, somehow, I can’t get them into the bag, and I can’t leave them behind. I feel powerless to do anything about them. Above all, I no longer say anything. Instead, I smile benignly at the malapropistic ingenuity of You’ve got to take the bull by the horns and run with it.
In short, if I’m not going to be a custodian of language, who will? If language is the instrument of our being - our lifeblood - who are its lifeguards? Our bones don’t chill to the peril of a metaphor gone wrong on the beach. We are not titillated by the all-consuming obsessiveness of television’s Metaphor Watch. Indeed, we fear almost nothing more than that the pedant - the real villain of a democratic society - might criticize our free self-expression and speech.
The custodians of the language? If they were ever the university professors of English (and I doubt that they were), those days are gone. Recently, at a colloquium given at a university English department (which university I must not say), the master of ceremonies, having summarized the speaker’s career and accomplishments, said, “I give you _______, without further adieu.” Perhaps he was familiar with the lecture and intended to pass judgement on it by leaving. Much adieu about nothing? As for custodians of the language, perhaps the best we can hope for is the genial musings of William Safire. In which case, aren’t the absurdities of our language endearing?
(First published in The Saanich Review, November, 1995)