{"id":18322,"date":"2019-09-24T13:55:33","date_gmt":"2019-09-24T13:55:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=18322"},"modified":"2019-09-24T13:55:33","modified_gmt":"2019-09-24T13:55:33","slug":"aprosdoketons-malaphors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=18322","title":{"rendered":"Aprosdoketons & Malaphors"},"content":{"rendered":"

I came across quite an interesting word on Twitter<\/a> the other day – aprosdoketon<\/strong> [\u02cc\u00e6p.\u0279\u0259s\u02c8d\u0251.k\u026a\u02cct\u0251n], which is defined as “a figure of speech in which an expected word in an idiom is replaced with an unexpected one – e.g. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a teacup'”.<\/p>\n

According to Wiktionary<\/a>, it can also refer to “any surprising use or interpretation of language”, and comes from the Ancient Greek \u1f00\u03c0\u03c1\u03bf\u03c3\u03b4\u03cc\u03ba\u03b7\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2<\/em> (aprosd\u00f3k\u0113tos – unexpected).<\/p>\n

Theres a collection of unintentional blended idioms and phrases on the Malaphors blog<\/a> – it seems that malaphor<\/strong> is another name for this blending of metaphors, idioms and other sayings. It was apparently coined by Lawrence Harrison in the Washington Post<\/em> in 1976 [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n

So remember not to count your chickens before they’ve crossed the road, and there’s no point in closing the stable door after leading a gift horse to water. Make sure to get all your ducks in one basket, and don’t let the pig out of the poke.<\/p>\n

Look before you leap from the frying pan to the fire, or you might find yourself in deep custard without a paddle. It’s not rocket surgery! In fact it’s as easy as falling off a piece of cake.<\/p>\n

The early bird in the hand catches two worms in the can, unless it’s barking up the wrong end of the stick.<\/p>\n

I’m sure you can come up with many more examples of aprosdoketons \/ malaphors.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I came across quite an interesting word on Twitter the other day – aprosdoketon [\u02cc\u00e6p.\u0279\u0259s\u02c8d\u0251.k\u026a\u02cct\u0251n], which is defined as “a figure of speech in which an expected word in an idiom is replaced with an unexpected one – e.g. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a teacup’”. According to Wiktionary, it can also refer to “any surprising […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,118,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-greek","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18322"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18332,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18322\/revisions\/18332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}