Comments on: You can lead a horse to water but you can’t teach him new tricks: The Joy of Hybridioms

By: Charlotte Jacques

Charlotte Jacques — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:10:40 +0000

Will Great article. I enjoyed it.
If your Dad is Trey, your Grandma was Meryl and you have a
sister who is a giant plant named Victoria, I,m your
Grandfathers cousin. Just writing to say I,m glad you,re
alive.

By: will

will — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:48:49 +0000

Great Examples, Geoff, and thanks for reading and responding!

Also, don’t worry, it happens to the best of us :p

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:41:24 +0000

… Incidentally, the “Induhvidual Quotes” in the Dilbert Newsletter (at dilbert.com) often feature hybridioms in the “Induhvidual Quotes” section…

speaking of expressive inarticulateness…

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:39:42 +0000

In his explanation of Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll talked of portmanteau words, saying that they emerged when a perfectly balanced mind had to choose between two words at the same moment, eg “frumious” - fuming and furious. However, the hybridiom seems to go with a rather unbalanced mind.

I think William is correct that they are coined by “hybridiots” who use expressions that they’ve heard in similar contexts but whose meaning and construction they don’t really understand. It seems to me an evolution of the “cut the mustard” bit - taking expressive inarticulateness to a whole new level. But done deliberately, they can be fun: if you’ve seen six of one, you’ve seen a half dozen of the other…

Incidentally, the “Induhvidual Quotes” in the Dilbert Newsletter (at dilbert.com) often feature hybridioms in the “Induhvidual Quotes” section. The last newsletter included:

“Well that really throws a wrench in the ointment.”

“They should lock him up and throw away the book.”

By: will

will — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:52:59 +0000

You’re quite right, the reason they may be happening could be that some people aren’t really sure what the actual form is. One other thing to keep in mind, though, is that especially in cases like “gets on my goat”, it’s quite possible that it’s just the written equivalent of a speech error. Perhaps the person began by saying “getting on my nerves”, but then, due to some strange cognitive crossfire, switched over to “gets my goat”. In this case, I think the worst we could accuse him/her of in that case would be inattention to typos and the lack of proofreading.

Regarding errors as the “bane” of linguists, I think it’s quite to the contrary, speech and language errors are truly fascinating and interesting to Linguists, because they tell us about the language, even when used incorrectly. When people make a spoonerism (switching “deer for chennis” when they mean “Cheer for Dennis”), it tells us what people consider to be independent sounds within a language (in this example, the fact that its’ “chennis” and not “dsheer for tennis” shows us that the T and SH sounds making up the CH are considered one in English). We don’t particularly mind when people change the language, even if that means that rules are lost, because it’s just more interesting stuff for us to describe. Besides, linguists trying to stop language change based on our own aesthetics is like a gardener trying to stop continental drift to keep the yard level.

Thanks for the comment, though, and I’m glad you enjoy reading my site.

By: William F. Styler

William F. Styler — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 18:53:46 +0000

I enjoyed the post, and I too have noticed such things more often recently.
I would like to suggest, however, that the majority of “hybridioms” are created unknowingly by “hybridiots”: people who are unread and uneducated enough to not know or understand the meaning of either idiom, and, worse still, don’t think enough about what they are saying to realize that they are not making sense, just noise.
Although I agree that a thoughtful person could conceivably create hybridioms that actually use the combination of the two to create a discernible and understandable new thought, above and beyond either or both of the sources (and would love to see examples of such), I suspect that most hybridioms result from the thoughtless ignorance that destroys meaning. (Such people must be the bane of the linguist, as they won’t/don’t/can’t use such rules or customs as do exist.)