h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Commonly Misheard Phrases - A53172119
Author: Malabarista - Most people's horizon is a circle with a radius of zero. They call it their point of view. - U1528154

I've been meaning to do this one for a while!

More relevant links will be added sooner or later.

Nice one Mal and very interesting

Cant add much and cant see anything I would change good work

Thanks.

Still tweaking the grammar and so on in places.

If you can think of any interesting expressions to add, say the word!

Good one. I like the idea very much.

I had one question. Maybe I'm just being dense, but when you say, "To shoo is to chase something with words or gestures" I don't understand how you chase something with words or gestures.

If I think of something along these lines, I'll let you know.

True. Maybe "using" is better. "To chase something in a certain direction using words or gestures".

I don't mean to be nitpicky, but I think my issue with that sentence is the use of the word 'chase'. I think 'chase' most often means that you're following the thing being chased, but if you're 'shoo'ing something, you're not pursuing it, and you're simply telling it to get the hell away.

Not necessarily. You can shoo chickens into the coop, for example.

Well, I don't agree, but it's not a big deal It was the only thing that caught me up a bit. Fine entry, as I said.

Doesn't really matter for the context anyway - so I can go look up "shoo" in a few more dictionaries, I suppose...

<< v : drive away by crying "shoo!" [syn: shoo off, shoo away] >>

Slightly splitting hairs I think

Websailor

But as this entry is about linguistic accuracy, I'll change it, since that seems to be consensus

I've added the example of free rein/free reign.

And a bit in the introduction. Apparently, there's a word for this, similar to mondegreen - it's "egg corn" or "eggcorn", after a woman who thought acorns were called "egg corns"...

Shagreen is often wromg from Shar green via shargrin to shag green.

On those 'shoo-ins', there's a difference between English and American meanings of 'shoo', and it appears to have resulted in the phrase changing meaning.

The English shoo things away. The original shoo-in was the chosen-to-win horse in a fixed race. The other jockeys wanted it to clear off and leave them behind, so they shood it away from them.

The Americans shoo things, such as animals into pens, not to be rid of them but to put them somewhere useful. So they interpreted the term shoo-in as meaning some sort of easy gain, which is its modern universal meaning.

I'm trying to imagine jockeys literally shooing the other horse away - a bit obvious, no?

This is a fantastic article, Mala. I do have one problem though, and that's with the title! They aren't mis-heard phrases; you hear them correctly. The problem is that they are homophones, and you can pick the wrong meaning. It confused me a little.

Unfortunately I don't have a better title, sorry.

... though thinking about it, that could be me not knowing the correct definition of 'mis-heard'...

Hmmm - "misunderstood" isn't quite right, either.

And I've been thinking about the literal shooing, Pin - have you got any sources for that? It seems a bit unlikely for several reasons:

1) It's too obvious.

2) Jockeys sitting on horses making gestures and noises to spook horses, yet only the intended one runs?

3) If simply chasing a horse worked that well for a burst of extra speed, they'd do that instead of using jockeys. The "losers" can help more by holding theirs back - those horses are already running flat out!

True, a horse will prefer to stay with the herd (especially in the middle of the herd) because something about the jockey and his whip says "Eeep! A panther on my back!" to the horse, but that's one of the things they work on in training, breaking away from the rest.

Mal:

I LOVE this entry!

Anything that increases literacy is great in my book!

For what it's worth, I'd agree that shoo-ing can work either direction. To me, it means to drive animals or people toward or away from something.

Maybe the other term you're struggling with could be best described as 'misconstrued'?

There is a phrase, 'hard stop', that is sometimes spoken as 'heart stop'. Heart stop would make some sense, if you're referring to a coronary; but the term actually comes from engineering/manufacturing where a machine has something the provides a hard 'stop' for some kind of mechanical movement.

Meanwhile, have a drink and more will come to you!

I should have mentioned that the reason that the correct interpretation is not always clear, is that the term is now being used in corporate circles to describe a need to end a meeting or project by a specific time, the hard-stop.