Thought I did a thread like this several years ago-no dice on a search tho.
This is where someone heard the idiom somewhere, but either misheard it, or misinterpreted it (or read it online somewhere where someone else had already mangled it). One I’ve seen twice here this week alone is “shoe-in” when it should be “shoo-in”-I guess they assume that it (whatever it is) is as easy as a foot slipping into footwear, but the actual origin is from “shooing” in someone, as in waving them in (say) the door.
Context: Way back in High School, some guys were sitting around talking about prurient shit like kids do, using crude language and euphemisms for jerking off and sex. This girl sitting in front of them turns around and yells, “Would you guys knock off all this talk about The Bearded Pope!”
She got “the bearded clam” and “bashing the bishop” all mixed up.
We fell about the place! If that chick don’t wanna know, forget her!
Comedian Dave Gorman had an episode on this topic in his (excellent, go and watch it now) show, “Modern Life is Goodish” recently. Based on one he’d found, he labelled them “catphrases”. He found in the wild:
It’s a doggy dog world
Like a bowl in a china shop*
Escape goat
Right from the gecko
*Some people were using this to mean what it appears to mean - boring, mundane, unexceptional. Which is quite the reverse from the original.
I had a work buddy with whom I played a fair amount of chess many years ago. He either had never known what “kosher” meant or felt that it was a mispronunciation of “cultured” so when he would comment on something “not being cultured” it was hard to decipher what he really meant.
He wasn’t by any chance from Russian roots, I suppose? I gather that in the earlier decades of the USSR, a thing in the then regime’s jargon arose from its wish for the people to become cultured: “nye-kulturny” (“non-cultured”) was a much used across-the-board term of disapproval.
Because to me “hear, hear” is correct - as in, “listen to what is being said!” and “here, here” bugs me. But then again “here, here” could be like “I understand what you’re saying over here.”