Malaphors | Unintentional blended idioms and phrases – It's the cream of the cake!
What is a malaphor? It's not rocket surgery! - OxfordWords blog
And there are orphaned negatives:
Orphan Negatives: Words You Probably Think Exist
World Wide Words: Missing opposites
Unpaired word - Wikipedia
Susie Dent on Twitter: "Dishevelled isn't an orphaned negative: it's from the French déchevelé, meaning your hair's all over the place. https://t.co/dRbLoPS59A"
'The country's favourite lexicographer'...
Countdown's Dictionary Corner queen Susie Dent: "I'm actually quite spontaneous" - iNews
... has just written a piece on them:
Susie Dent: People are always asking me to add words to the dictionary
“But couldn’t you just add it to the dictionary? Pleeease?” It’s a question I hear a lot, from people who have come up with a stonker of a new word and are desperate for it to be officially recognised.
I’m so used to being the party pooper that my answer is routine now: I can’t just add something on a whim, because dictionaries reflect, above all, frequency of use. No matter how colourful, how crucial, how wildly imaginative the new offering might be, only the English-speaking collective can decide its fate.
Recently, though, I’ve found myself at the other end of the conversation, longing to introduce words that are crying out for an audience; to breathe new life into terms that inexplicably vanished without trace centuries ago.
You have to ask what’s happened to our mindset that we are now so gloomy, so very – as they put it in the 16th century – “ill-willy” as opposed to “well-willy”
On the face of it, what I’m talking about doesn’t exactly sound sexy. My job-in-trade is full of jargon, which the Countdown crew is well used to by now. Rachel Riley, Nick Hewer and our floor manager Jay all mouth a silent cheer whenever I drop a favourite buzzword (“buzz” may be a stretch).
Take the malaphor, a shy term for a phenomenon that I can’t seem to get enough of. These are the slips of the tongue that are halfway between a metaphor and a malapropism, the mangled idiom blends that give us “he’s a minefield of information”; “it’s not rocket surgery”; “adding salt to injury”, “like lemmings to the slaughter”, and “till the cows come home to roost”. Once you tune in, you can’t stop hearing them. Even in the loo: two women chatting over the cubicles last week gave me a new favourite: “You wash my back sweetheart, and I’ll wash yours.”
But the greatest fist-pump from the crew (I like to think it’s affectionate) is saved for the words “orphaned negative.” The terms that, at some point in their past, have lost their mojo and now travel on alone. These are the unkempts, uncouths, underwhelmeds, and non-plusseds of this world – terms that linger on the bad, sad, seamy side of life. Those that can never quite be gruntled without being dissed as well.
Couth and uncouth
As it turns out, many of the happier siblings of words like these were once alive and well – and some of them are still hanging on, just. Kempt is from the German for combed, and is a useful byword for being neat and tidy.
To be couth back in the 14th century, was to be affable and agreeable; you can still be couthie in Scotland (being couth has always been critical to dating success apparently – as Chaucer liked to warn: “uncouth, unkissed”). Any ruly person, meanwhile, was pretty good at sticking to the rules. And so it goes on: our ancestors had the chance to be pecunious (rich), toward (obliging), ruth (full of compassion), and wieldy (handy with a weapon).
You have to ask what’s happened to our mindset that we are now so gloomy, so very – as they put it in the 16th century – “ill-willy” as opposed to “well-willy”. We all know about Schadenfreude, but how many of us know the happier alternative confelicity, joy in the happiness of others? But then we’ve always been a pretty pessimistic lot. The number of slang words for ugly outranks those for beautiful by a good ten to one.
“‘But couldn’t you just add it to the dictionary? Pleeease?’ It’s a question I hear a lot.”
Dig into British dialect and you’ll find the widest vocabulary for things connected to our health and bodies dwell on the more unsavoury aspects: blisters, for example, or armpits. And when it comes to being knock-kneed, pigeon-toed, or splay-footed, you’d be hard-pressed to find a place that doesn’t have a local name for it (straddly-bandy, troll-footed, sprog-hocked…).
Even the wonderful gruntled began as a negative – it meant dissatisfied all by itself until the “dis” came along for emphasis. Not that this should stop us; P.G. Wodehouse certainly had fun with it: Jeeves “spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled”.
Language revival
As Wodehouse realised, one of the greatest pleasures of our language is its capacity for wordplay. In How I Met My Wife, Jack Winter concocted a tour-de-force of missing opposites. “Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable.
There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or sung hero were slim”. (For the record, you can indeed be an ept, sung, maculate persona grata. Flappable, according to the OED, has so far proved evitable).
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to revive some of these? To reunite our linguistic orphans with their happier families so that they can walk about cognito, feel requited love, and be totally chalant? We do have the power – after all, English is entirely democratic. Usage is queen – the more of us who decide we’d like to be positively ert in our pursuit of change, the more likely it is to happen.
Ever the optimist, I’ll be checking my flickering databases daily for signs – and for as many malaphors as I can gather. Surely the time has come for us to wake up and spill the beans.
Susie Dent: People are always asking me to add words to the dictionary
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