steepholm | Unstable Expressions

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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?

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From:

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".

From:

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.

From:

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)

From:

steepholm

A little, I think!

From:

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.