dead metaphors are really interesting honestly and specifically i’m interested in when they become malapropisms like, the…
dead metaphors are really interesting honestly and specifically i’m interested in when they become malapropisms
like, the concept being, people are familiar with the phrase and what people use it to mean metaphorically, but it’s not common knowledge anymore what the metaphor was in literal reference to. people still say “toe the line” but don’t necessarily conjure up the image of people standing at the starting line of a race, forbidden from crossing over it. people still say “the cat is out of the bag” without necessarily knowing it’s a sailors’ expression referring to a whip being brought out for punishment. some metaphors are so dead we don’t even know where they come from; like, there are ideasabout what “by hook or by crook” references, but no one is entirely sure. nobody knows what the whole nine yards are.
and then you throw in a malaprop or a mondegreen or two, where because people don’t know what the actual words of the expression refer to, they’re liable to replace them with similar sounding words (see “lack toast and tolerant”). so we can literally go from a phrase referencing a common, everyday part of life to a set of unfixed, contextless sounds with a completely different meaning. that’s fascinating.what an interesting piece of the way language and culture are living, changing, coevolving things.
maybe part of the reason we can’t figure out where some phrases come from is that over time the words themselves have changed! one of the theories about “the whole nine yards” is that it’s a variant of “the whole ball of wax,” which some people furthertheorize was originally “the whole bailiwick,” meaning just “the whole area”! the addition of “nine yards” might be related to “dressed to the nines,” which might reference the fucking Greek muses!language is so weird and cool! (and I only know any idioms in two languages!)
the point is. I just came across the words “nip it in the butt” in a piece of published, professional fiction, and now I can’t stop giggling.
someone put ‘within a hare’s breath’ in an AO3 tag and it stopped me cold. because you’re leaving the general sense of the idiom and its physical phonemes almost intact, and yet replacing the actual words and metaphor with something completely unrelated.
a hare’s breath is small in a completely different way than a hair’s breadth and works very differently as a unit of distance.
and yet the general idea of ‘small, close, tiny gap, no barrier, a near thing, almost’ remains intact, and if you didn’t know what had happened there you would never figure it out.
when i was little i had a book by the side of my bed called who put the butter in the butterfly and it was about the history of idioms. i would read it to calm down and sleep. i have it practically memorized and i do not recommend it because it was very boring. (no, i somehow wasn’t diagnosed until my late twenties.)
according to that author, “whole nine yards” is hotly debated with a few more-modern popular origins; such as the length of ammunition within a WWII gun (but it most likely is more modern than ancient greece - the first use i can find of the term is in 1855).
however, the author favored a more simple, textile explanation (which i in turn also favor): when you go to a clothing store, they measure out your purchase in yards in front of you. i am not a seamstress, but google says that an everyday dress can take between 5-7 yards, whereas a fancy ballgown can take 8-10. asking for the “whole nine yards” is twofold: it both assumes you’re going to be making something big and fancy, and it is making sure you don’t get shortchanged by the fabric merchant ( literally receiving the entire nine yards you are asking for). and although unsubstantiated, i wonder if it might be part of where we get the term “dressing to the nines” from as well - you are so fancy-dressed, you need nine yards of fabric.
i feel strongly this is backed up by the “ball of wax” connection as well; since (like you said!!!) there’s historical precedent that “ball of wax” as an idiom “most likely [is] a mondegreen of the idiom the whole bailiwick, meaning the whole territory.” (It also connects with a 17th century practice of dividing territory amongst heirs). but if whole ball of wax means the entire territory, doesn’t it make sense that whole nine yards would also mean a legitimate and tactile nine whole yards of fabric?doesn’t it make sense that we would smoosh together the meaning of “whole territory” with “whole piece of cloth”? i don’t know, i like that idea :)
additionally - just in the evidence? one of the first uses of the term “the whole nine yards” is the following line from a woman complaining in a 1855 news article: “[…] I told her to get just enough to make three shirts; instead of making three, she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt!“
i have loved doing this research with y'all, thank you for listening. but i do just want to say - sometimes, the practice of linguistics shows us places where people have been silenced or devalued. there’s something here about the silent history of working-class people and of women’s work specifically - that it usually takes some digging before people consider that women and (worse! alas! a working woman!) seamstresses might be the ones who coined a very-popular term. in a lot of thearticles i read for this essay, the first assumptions were that men (men in war, men on boats) had to have coined the term, even when it didn’t make any real sense. there is a very normal and even very likely reason for this term - and still, people are baffled by it, just because men don’t know where it could have come from.
and i think, to your point beforehand - how interesting, when idioms show us the places that we have been able to cover up and forget about. what makes something dead? i have no idea where the word podcastcomes from, but the boomers were horrified when kids didn’t know why the save button is a floppy disc. that word i used up there, mondegreen?it was coined by Sylvia Wright. i have no idea who coined your guess is as good as mine and i have used it within the last 2 hours.
and, like, on a less serious note - do you know how long it took before i learned it’s actually spelled bury the lede? and like, i have always been honest about this, but when i was younger i thought a ”garden-variety longhair cat“ meant literallya variety of cat related to the garden.
so, yeah!!! a little bit of joy. i love so many things about this, about this discussion - across all of time and space and the internet, we get so freakin’ excited about words. and sometimes it makes us think about a bolt of cloth passing over someone’s hands. and then sometimes, there’s this really beautiful moment where something is just-as-true-now as it was back in 1855. we still measure out our fabric in yards in front of the customer. the person on the other side of the counter still has to prove it’s all nine yards.
and like, sometimes you work in a big office in a fancy building and your boss confidently commands you to whether the storm. within minutes of this, flustered, he will ask for your hodge jancock,and you are going to be sobrave about it and not even laugh once.