I was going through an old pile of paper in my office recently and encountered a set of note cards I’d accumulated years ago, back in the very small, scrappy, it-definitely-might-not-make-it startup stage. Most of the cards contained miscellaneous reminders, todos, or ideas I thought worthy of further exploration.<\/p>\n
A few of the cards, though, had the record of an idiom mixing game my colleagues and I played back in the day (I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with strongly multi-disciplinary and linguistically inclined geeks).<\/p>\n
At its basic level, the game produced comprehensible phrases that amusingly combined two familiar idioms, such as “there are other fish to skin”<\/em>, or “there are other cats in the sea”<\/em>.<\/p>\n These are good for a chuckle, but not fundamentally anything more than language slapstick. Some combined idioms of similar intent in ways that made more vibrant images than did the originals, such as<\/p>\n “that opens up a whole new can of monkeys”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n (A “can of worms” is one thing, but monkeys make everything funnier.) Rather than just “getting ducks in a row” or having things “fall in line”, we had<\/p>\n “all the ducks are falling in line”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Other are amusing but confusing, and almost seem as if they mean something, at least until you actually think about them. Example:<\/p>\n “Happier than a clam in pigsh*t”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The pinnacle of our mixed idiom game, though, were those hard to find combinations whose meanings were a novel blend of the original idioms. Most of these tended to mockingly riff on various elements of commonly accepted corporate-speak.<\/p>\n “I’m just putting them on the table as I see them”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n for example, takes the casual (if sometimes cowardly) innocence of the defensive verbal communication standby “I’m just calling them as I see them” with the trite business-ese of “putting something on the table” to create an all-new description of an impetuous laziness thrust upon others.<\/p>\n Better still, in my opinion, is the lighthearted cynical foreshadowing of:<\/p>\n “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n But my favorite, by far, is a sadly apt commentary on organizational politics gone awry:<\/p>\n “I dropped the ball in your court”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Have more? Oh yes you do … comment away!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was going through an old pile of paper in my office recently and encountered a set of note cards I’d accumulated years ago, back in the very small, scrappy, it-definitely-might-not-make-it startup stage. Most of the cards contained miscellaneous reminders, todos, or ideas I thought worthy of further exploration. A few of the cards, though, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-business","category-8-id","category-11-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netfluvia.org\/layer8\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netfluvia.org\/layer8\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netfluvia.org\/layer8\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netfluvia.org\/layer8\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netfluvia.org\/layer8\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.netfluvia.org\/layer8\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netfluvia.org\/layer8\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netfluvia.org\/layer8\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netfluvia.org\/layer8\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}