Wet around the gills: conflating idioms

It started with my father, the bastard. He passed it on to me and there's nothing I can do. That's science. Darwin provided us with the perfect excuse. I am not responsible for the way I am. It's all society and ancestry, my bloated arthritic gay great-grandmother and the one-room metal box where I was raised in downtown shitville. Thankfully I'm preaching to a dead horse. We're all evolutionists now.

My father's verbal memory was a tricky bastard. It didn't start that way, at least according to his stories, which I, his only child, heard ad nauseum every day of my youth. When he was in his 20s and 30s, he did those impossible newspaper crosswords every day and blew the competition out of the water. He would refer to Martin Riggs (from Lethal Weapon) as “John Smith” because Mel Gibson played Riggs and also voice acted Smith in “Pocahontas”.

I remember him saying that he was trying to “nail the hammer on the head” and advised me not to “count all my eggs before they hatch”. He would try to “shoot the blue moon” when playing Hearts online. With his mourned that he would “burn that bridge when [he] came to it.” It was all amusing as hell until I noticed that I was cursed with the same problem.

Today I said “wet around the gills,” after which my wife glanced pityingly in my direction, like Professor Higgins to Eliza Dolittle before she gained the insufferable accent. Being sure of the rightness of my poetic instinct, I googled the phrase. 5,590 hits, or rather, only 5,590 hits. Google proceeds to reveal that my brain is conflating two idioms. “Green around the gills” scores 985,000 hits. “Wet around the ears” gets 19.3 million.

That a phrase exists on the Internet is hardly the litmus test for its rightness or coherence. Even “green around the gizzard” may be found on page 146 in an e-book entitled Sundays in August. People will publish any wild herring these days. Judging by research by the International Data Corporation, we should be closing in on 3 zettabytes of global information, and I may not be able to fathom the ridiculous volume of information that entails, but I do know it includes that every moron like myself who posts a comment on Youtube and all those posts may or may not be included in a Google search. (In fact I tried googling a youtube comment I made a few years ago and thank God, nothing showed, which means that not every word ever interneted is forever available.)

I conclude that there are up to 5,589 other mental delinquents out there, and I can still be proud to say that before this article I never published the phrase.

I'm getting off-track. I was trying to discussing conflating idioms. Conflations.com defines this common confusion as “an amalgamation of two different expressions. In most cases, the combination results in a new expression that makes little sense literally, but clearly expresses an idea because it references well-known idioms.” The introductory articles goes on to distinguish between conflations that are still interpreted to mean the same thing (e.g. “look who's calling the kettle black”) from conflations that do not – usually rendered as incoherent as a red goose chase.

But I'm in good company. During the October 7, 2008 Presidential debate, Barack Obama made a similar error. “Now, Senator McCain suggests that somehow... I'm green behind the ears.” The best part is, this could be taken (at least out of context) as the Democratic candidate, still smarting from the birthing controversies, making a Freudian slip and referring to himself as an alien (i.e. little green man).

And now I live in France, which makes it easier, but I live with my wife, who is an educated linguaphile with a perfect memory and an insatiety for pop culture, which makes home a constant stream of embarrassing moments. For years I was able to pride myself on my golden tongue – not so hard when you teach English to Hispanics, French to Americans, and you live with aforementioned dad.

I suppose the dagger's practically in the coffin. Right? Anybody?