Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 12 August 2006

Backs, bats and dead metaphors

issue 12 August 2006

Reporting a case of corruption recently, the Yorkshire Post quoted an observation about a culprit: ‘Any work he was doing was off his own back and he should not have been paid.’ Meanwhile the Cambridge Evening News reported the deliverance from a custodial sentence of a ‘nuisance drunk’ in Newmarket who had waved a samurai sword at police (what a lot of people possess samurai swords; not a recommendation of character, I’d have thought), but had ‘aspirations to become a landscape gardener and is now attending drink counselling off his own back’.

Back should, of course, be bat. This is a typically mangled example of a dead metaphor, a cliché if you like, or, more respectably, an idiom. The phrase is not examined by the speaker, or, if it is examined cursorily, it seems to make a kind of sense.

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