Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Words
I have a confession to make. I’m a stickler for matters of grammar and style. I can get a bit anal about it to be honest. I blame the parents. My mother actually – she used to be an English teacher, and some of it obviously rubbed off on me. Perhaps my ideal career is as a sub-editor. There is a particular type of mistake that I have noticed a lot of in South African publications, perhaps because English is often not the mother tongue of the writer.
The thing is, I don’t know what it is called when you garble the message by not understanding a phrase’s origin. This is what I am talking about:
Baited breath / bated breath
Tow the line / toe the line
To the manor born / to the manner born
It’s not quite a malapropism, but I don’t know what it is. That last one was from the Telegraph’s cricket coverage, so perhaps it was meant to be a clever play on the use of the word ‘manor’, meaning an area of London. Or perhaps the writer thinks that Robert Key looks like Penelope Keith. Who knows.
The thing is, I don’t know what it is called when you garble the message by not understanding a phrase’s origin. This is what I am talking about:
Baited breath / bated breath
Tow the line / toe the line
To the manor born / to the manner born
It’s not quite a malapropism, but I don’t know what it is. That last one was from the Telegraph’s cricket coverage, so perhaps it was meant to be a clever play on the use of the word ‘manor’, meaning an area of London. Or perhaps the writer thinks that Robert Key looks like Penelope Keith. Who knows.
