My grandfather had a saying: You can lead a horse to drink, but you can’t make him water.
Once said to the father of a gal I was suiting, “My honors are intentional.” he didn’t get it. I didn’t get her.
Ah! Kill two birds in one bush.
I worked for a guy who did this a lot. The only one I can remember is “we don’t want the dog wagging the cart”.
I once heard a lizard say “Time is fun when you’re having flies.”
<lights blue touchpaper>
And what about those numbskulls who say “You’ve got another thing coming” and “I could care less”? 
<retires to safe distance>
The thing is, “You’ve got another thing coming” is perfectly legitimate. It makes far more sense than “think.”
And people who don’t get that are a few sandwiches short of a Christmas tree.
Time flies when you’re having rum!
It might make sense (actually to me it doesn’t at all), but it is undeniably a corruption of the original saying, which only makes sense with “think”. Anyway that’s been done to death before…
A couple from the sporting world:
“I need to pull a rabbit out of the fire here” - John Francome
“I thought we started very, very brightly but the Achilles’ heel which has bitten us in the backside all year has stood out like a sore thumb.” (possibly deliberate!) - Andy King
One I heard on the radio, and have used as one of my signature files since -
Carl Banks on a NY Giants broadcast: “If it ain’t broke, don’t break it.”
My favorite is from a real employee-of-the-month poster I saw hanging on a wall. It included a quote from her supervisor:
“Suzie can always be counted on to take the ball and roll with it.”
I love how the mistake turns a very simple straightforward expression about proactivity and progress and makes it into something so passive. I always imagine someone on a giant ball rolling down a a dirt hill getting squashed every rotation.
Some idiot politician (probably) here described some situation as “standing on the precipice of a runaway train” which prompted this response from Mitch Benn on Radio 4’s The Now Show:
I’ll exclaim: “you say potato, I say potato”, pronouncing potato exactly the same way each time.
I’ll even sing it that way.
I annoy a lot of people.
Had a manager, who frequently used biz-speak metaphors, say “How do you eat an elephant? You start with the low-hanging fruit”.
Eww.
Back in high school, our English teacher showed us an old essay in which the writer described “the virgin forest, pregnant with wildlife.”
THAT was the ultimate mixed (and contradictory) metaphor.
Only one? :eek:
Intentional one: “dude thinks he’s la crême de la crême but merde floats too.”
I’m invented a bush in the bed is worth two in the bar!
A nice old lady who used to work for my grandparents: “I use my head for something besides a coathanger!”