You know, I feel like a break from commenting on current events, even if they are interesting from an apoc-fiction perspective. It’s a bit like researching a war by being close to the front, I feel… “Wow, here I am in the action as it happens!” <shell explodes in near distance> “Okay too close! Taking five!”

So let’s talk a term that I’ve somehow missed out on in my near half-century of existence: malaphor.

Metaphor? No, malaphor. Listen, don’t make me repeat myself or there’ll be Hell to shake a stick at!

The term malaphor itself is a portmanteau  of “malapropism” and “metaphor.” In a malapropism a similar but incorrect word is used in a phrase, for example “Behold the suppository of all wisdom!” or “You ain’t heard the least of me!”

Malaphor takes that phenomenon and extends it to an entire idiom. I mean look at what I typed above and you might have scratched your head and thought, “Isn’t the phrase ‘there’ll be Hell to pay!’?” and it’s something else you shake a stick at?

Congrats, pardner, you found yourself a malaphor.

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it” is another good example. It’s closely related to the concept of a mixed metaphor but isn’t so much outright contradictory as just a bizarre mixing of colloquialisms.

Stick that in your pipes that broke the camel’s back.