Monday, July 2, 2007

Confusing Expressions

If I swerve in the nick of time to avoid an oncoming car, it's likely to be described as a near miss. I've often wondered why. It was an actual miss. I could understand a near collision, or a near disaster, or a near death experience, but a near miss would seem to mean I nearly missed, but didn't! Why do we commonly describe a near hit as a near miss?

And here's another one that strikes me as odd. Why do we describe someone flipping vertically as going head over heels? When I stand firmly upright, my head is normally over my heels. We use the expression head over heels when heels over head is clearly the image we are trying to convey. What's even odder to me is that hardly anyone ever questions this. If someone says, "he fell head over heels," our minds envision a man flipping heels over head.

One that baffled me as a child was "You can't have your cake and eat it too." If I have it, why the heck can't I eat it? It was satisfying to learn that the expression was originally, "You can't eat your cake and have it, too." That works better for me. I see the logic more clearly. Of course, it works either way as long as the and isn't assumed to indicate sequentiality. But it seems to me that sequence is easy to infer--as in a "hit and run" accident. You can't just switch those around without wrecking the point.

The cake expression apparently has been around since the 16th Century (http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/7/messages/470.html). But the reverse-order version's been common for about 180 years. In researching the phrase, I learned that one clue to the identity of the Unabomber was his use of the original form of the expression ("You can't eat your cake and have it, too") in his manifesto. It narrowed the field of suspects to word nerds.(http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002762.html).

The sequentiality thing causes confusion with expressions like back and forth and put on your shoes and socks. I find it easier to put on socks before shoes, and I've never gone back without first going forth.

Got any other common expressions that seem to defy common sense?

1 comment:

Liz Jones said...

Well, there's the ever popular "driving the parkway, then parking in the driveway."
That's always been a favorite of mine.