I’d like to thank my lovely friend Sam for the inspiration for this blog, and for being the giggliest, funniest friend I have. Sam is a bit deaf, and often mishears things and so she started to search her funny misheard idioms on Twitter, to see if others misheard things in the same way. The results are hilarious.
You can keep yourself entertained for hours with this game, you simply log into Twitter and then use the search box to search for tweets containing things like ‘for all intensive purposes’, ‘car pool tunnel’, ‘blessing in the skies’, and any others you can think of (if you find a funny one we haven’t covered, tell us in the comments!).
I’ve popped together some screen shots of some of the funniest of these I’ve found, but do let us know if you have heard any others.
Of course, we can’t snigger too much, idioms change and the language changes, as often through misspelling and mispronunciation as through usage changes, and it’s something we all play a part in. Did you know that the phrase ‘spitting image’ is a mishearing of the biblical ‘spit and image’ derived from the way that God crafted Adam? Around 100 years ago, the error started to appear in print, and now very few people remember the original phrase. Another well-known one is ‘another thing coming’, I’ve heard people laughed at for saying ‘another think coming’ but this was actually the original idiom, a play on words from ‘if that’s what you think, then you have another think coming’.
You learn something new every day!
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