Mangling Phrases
Maybe I'm just getting crankier as I age, but I really hate seeng metaphorical phrases get mangled.
The one that drives me up the wall a lot these days is seeing "free reign". No, no, no! A thousand times, NO! I realize how it has come about, of course, and this one starts with the problem of homophones in English (you know, words that sound like each other, but are spelled differently). Rain, reign and rein all sound alike. It's amazing that we don't see "free rain" thrown into the mix, but I think that a certain degree of sense and logic keeps that from happening. People do still vaguely understand that "free rein" seems to mean to be without rules. But modern life has come so very far from the daily use of horses as transportation that few people really understand what reins do.
"Free rein" meant to give the horse its head, let it wander where it would, to exert no control over the animal's direction.
But, these days, when I see people putting "free reign" into their sentences, that isn't quite what they mean. They usually seem to be talking about when someone is given the freedom to make up their own rules. It's not about aimless wandering, but about a maverick asserting his own sense of direction on things. So, people do still remember the meaning of "reign" (to rule), and have done plastic surgery on the original metaphor and plopped it down in this new context. It still feels wrong to me, because there isn't anything really free about the situations they apply it to (the main personage seems to be imposing his own will on others, so what is "free" about that?). And I still remember the proper origin.
*sigh*
Lately, in a Vonage commercial, another mangling has popped up. A new Vonage customer, in reference to the size of his old phone bill, said "It was the white elephant in the room."
Oh. No.
Rightly, the phrase should be "it was the elephant in the room". Because an elephant indoors is remarkable enough without needing an adjective of any sort attached to it. A "white elephant" in the non-literal sense is an object that is sort of interesting, but which no one really wants.
(Yes, I'm about to quote from Wikipedia - which has the blessing and curse of being convenient, if not always most accurate. But it's close enough on this occasion for my purposes...)
A white elephant is an idiom for a valuable but burdensome possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) is out of proportion to its usefulness or worth. From the story that the kings of Siam (now Thailand) were accustomed to make a present of one of these animals to courtiers who had rendered themselves obnoxious, in order to ruin the recipient by the cost of its maintenance. In modern usage, it is an object, scheme, business venture, facility, etc., considered to be without use or value.
The term derives from the sacred white elephants kept by Southeast Asian monarchs in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. To possess a white elephant was regarded (and is still regarded in Thailand and Burma) as a sign that the monarch reigned with justice and power, and that the kingdom was blessed with peace and prosperity. The tradition derives from tales which associate a white elephant with the birth of the Buddha, as his mother was reputed to have dreamed of a white elephant presenting her with a lotus flower, a symbol of wisdom and purity, on the eve of giving birth. Because the animals were considered sacred and laws protected them from labor, receiving a gift of a white elephant from a monarch was simultaneously both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because the animal was sacred and a sign of the monarch's favour, and a curse because the animal had to be retained and could not be put to much practical use, but cost a significant amount to maintain.
So, really... is one's phone bill, a service for which one has knowingly contracted, really to be compared to an expensive but unwanted gift? I mean, I did get the part of the mangled metaphor where the size of the bill was so huge it warranted being compared to an elephant. I even get the concept of the bill being that which everyone is trying to ignore when it is actually impossible to ignore ("elephant in the room"). But "white elephant"? Come on.
These are the two manglings that have been irritating me lately. There are so many more that fly by these days. It seems to me that people don't really pay attention to them anymore. They don't try to figure out where the phrase comes from and so they don't bother to be sure that the phrase really addresses what they want to convey. (You see it all the time on Survivor where the contestant tries to "talk big" and sound more impressive about their strategy, rather than just be straight-forward.) I guess it hurts me, because these things are alive to me, and I hate seeming them handled and used like so much spoiled, dead fish - mere fertilizer.
Yeah, I'm cranky.