Slang, mixed idioms, and the monster mash of language

Many people get immensely irritated by mixed metaphors, especially in idioms, but I’ve always loved them – carrots say a lot more when they’ve escaped the ends of sticks and dangle at the ends of long, dark tunnels.

Those wild stabs in the back, those white elephants in the room, those barnacles grabbing onto the wheels of progress – these “frankenphrases” might seem a hotchpotch of ill-matched bits and pieces, but there’s no doubt they grab your attention.

So was Pauline Hanson’s reference to immigration figures as the “white elephant in the room” (Q&A, 27 August, 2018) a mystifying malaphor, or was it a brilliant conflation of phrases capturing a giant unaddressed issue that was at the same time costly and troublesome? (Then again, maybe it was a subtle reference to white privilege?)

In fact, remarks about big white elephants in the room have been around since at least the 1950s – it looks like a blend that’s here to stay (and if you search for them, you’ll also find in that room pink elephants, and even the occasional baby elephant).

Frankenphrases

Whatever you think of these gloriously fused idioms, they’re one of the vital signs of the “pulsing life of language”, to use wordsmith Eric Partridge’s early description of slang. Certainly, our survey and our trawling of the lists of ABC listeners’ favourite slang expressions threw up a number of particularly novel ones.

“Fair suck of the raw prawn” presents a memorable image that manages to draw on the mythology of values like loyalty and the fair go (the fair crack of the whip), at the same time as evoking the importance of honesty and sincerity (don’t come the raw prawn). Or does it?

Like many of these mixed metaphoric idioms, you probably don’t want to think too much about it. And as Kari Sullivan’s account shows, many metaphoric mixtures often don’t make a lot of sense.

A tangle of roos and sheep

Aussie slang has many examples where routine provides a kind of life support framework to keep an idiom alive, sometimes over centuries – particularly common are expressions to describe someone who’s not the full quid, not the full tin of Milo, not the full jar of Vegemite, not the full tube of Dencorub …

Since at least the early 1800s, we’ve been playing around with this “not the full X”/“X short of Y” pattern to describe someone who’s a bit daft.

A shingle short (of a roof) was one of the earliest. It inspired a stubby short of a six-pack, a lamington short of a CWA meeting, a snag short of a barbie, a shrub short of a herbaceous border, a few bars short of a signal (of a mobile), and many more.

It’s just a matter of inserting a more vivid or up-to-date image into the frame – missing (or loose) tiles on roofs are replaced by missing bars on mobile phones.

And in the true spirit of the frankenphrase, occasionally, these expressions collide – a few kangaroos short in the top paddock shows a puzzling tangle of a few roos loose in the top paddock and a few sheep short in the top paddock. Well, perhaps a piece of land does require the full complement of kangaroos to qualify as an Australian paddock.

Metaphors generally highlight reality, and even generate aspects of reality that go way beyond literal language. Metaphors offer two loaves where there seems to be one – they might even throw in a load of fish, to paraphrase novelist Bernard Malamud. And when they’re mixed, it can be a bucketload of fish.

But it’s true – not all are entirely successful. I’ve never been convinced by the message (or the poetry) of cutting off your balls to spite your face – though it’s certainly memorable.

Go to our website to catch up on other discoveries on the history and evolution of Aussie slang, and to comment on this article. We’d love your feedback.