Unstable Expressions

[steepholm]

Interesting linguistic fact. Because as a child I associated the expressions "Too many cooks spoil the broth" and "Too many chiefs and not enough Indians" (I know, I know), for a long time I heard "sous-chef" as "Sioux chef".

Because the logical connection between "Spare the rod and spoil the child" is one of "A causes B", I heard "Feed a cold and starve a fever" the same way. It was confusing.

"Don't let good food go to waste" teeters perpetually on the brink of "Don't let good food go to waist", thus almost reversing its own meaning.

Any others?

Comments

[calimac]

Sure. For one thing I heard "Spare the rod and spoil the child" not as a cautionary note, but in the form of a command: you should spare the rod and you should spoil the child.

I thought the phrase "out of wedlock" meant as a result of wedlock. You can imagine how confusing that was.

[steepholm]

Perfectly reasonable assumptions.

The more I look at the word "wedlock", the odder it seems.

[antisoppist]

"Can't see the wood for the trees". I still don't know if it means wood as in forest or wood as in useful product that is made from trees.

It could be that you are too busy looking at trees and not seeing the bigger beautiful forest, or it could be that you are too busy looking at trees that you are not seeing that you could chop them down and make tables out of them.

I think it is supposed to be the former, but then I'm not sure how you could not notice a forest and then I think it must mean the other one again.

There is also "can't have your cake and eat it" which often gets interpreted as "can't eat your cake and eat it" rather than "can't keep your cake to look at (why? that is not the point of cake) and eat it".

[steepholm]

The cake one is just hugely confusing. How can you eat a cake without having it? Unless you eat someone else's cake, but even then...

I hadn't thought about Interpretation 2 of the wood/trees expression, but now you say it I will be living with it ever more.

[cmcmck]

The original form of that one was 'You can't eat your cake and have it' although I'm not sure if that makes any more sense! :o)

[steepholm]

A little, I think!

[the_rck]

I’ve always heard ‘you can’t see the forest for the trees.’

Around here we wouldn’t use singular wood to mean a stand of trees or larger area with trees. We’d call it ‘a wooded area ‘ or ‘a woods.’ Never the singular. I wonder when/where the verbal divergence happened.

[lilliburlero]

"You can't be too thin or too rich" gave me many hours of childhood bafflement. What was stopping you?

[steepholm]

I don't think I'd even heard that one!

[lilliburlero]

Often attributed to Wallis Simpson...

[the_rck]

I was hugely confused about ‘the die is cast’ because I’d never encountered ‘die’ as the singular of ‘dice.’ I assumed that this was some sort of specialist term for adding dye to water. I could see that as an irrevocable act that might not yield exact results. I just lost the idea of it being all luck/in the hands of the gods.

[steepholm]

Ah yes, you've reminded me that I had the same problem - except that I used to think it was "die" in a metalworking sense. "Cast" misled me.

[calimac]

A recipe with herbs in it reminded me that I thought the song "Scarborough Fair" (which I knew from Simon & Garfunkel) went:

Parsley, sage, Rosemary and Tom

That is, two seasonings and two people.

[steepholm]

Mondegreen is a treacherous land.

[landingtree]

For years I assumed "More haste, less speed," was a recommendation instead of meaning "A causes B". Not so fast, be hastier! I held that assumption in my head even while using the phrase as it's intended, like one of those idioms which no longer breaks up easily into pieces.

[steepholm]

I was fine with that one for years, until I came across the Latin motto "festina lente", which means roughly the same thing and may even be the origin of the English phrase, but expresses it as an oxymoron ("hasten slowly").

[nancylebov]

These days, there's a restaurant called Sioux Chef.

[steepholm]

Thanks for letting me know. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Ever since my dream of opening a Japanese restaurant called Nippon Tuck was gazumped, I've come to accept that there's nothing new under the culinary sun.

[ethelmay]

Not quite the same thing, but my mother said she spent many hours as a child puzzling over the Old Gold cigarette slogan "Not a cough in a carload." What if there was a cough in two carloads? Wouldn't it have to be in one of them?

[steepholm]

That's logic!

I don't know that slogan, but I'm also wondering whether they mean a carload of smokers (say, four people), in which case the claim is oddly modest, or a carload of cigarettes, which raises the question of why they aren't being transported in some more suitable vehicle, such as a truck.

[ethelmay]

I assumed it meant a railroad car.

[steepholm]

Oh, that makes sense. Divided by a common language yet again!