Review: This guy is really waking our eyes up!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 18, 2012
From Rev. Spooner and before to Yogi Berra, some people have become well known for their losing battles with language. Don Bender's compilation of goofy comments spoken at meetings shows that people who are not well known at all can fracture the English tongue just as thoroughly.The cover identifies these 250 sayings as Volume 1, and Bender asks for reviews in order to make improvements for future volumes. It is in that spirit that I offer this one.The title, Mixed Metaphor Madness, rolls nicely off the tongue, but it doesn't quite describe the contents. Most sayings are someone's attempt to repeat a stale cliche, whether they mix metaphors or not.Sometimes they get one of the words wrong: "You're going to be on thin water [ice]," or "I don't know off the top of my hand [head]."Sometimes they put words or concepts in the wrong order: "If I've told you a million times, I've told you once."Sometimes they apparently can't decide which cliche to use and wind up mashing more than one together: "That was the silver lining of the pig's ear" or "He's got a lot of balls in the fire."Sometimes they seem to have no idea what the cliche actually means: "By the end of the summer, she has pitch white hair." Pitch (tar) is black. Does this person have a  clue? Or how about "the whole shittin' caboodle?" Probably no one knows what "kit and caboodle" means without looking it up, but shouldn't everyone at least know how to say it correctly?Sometimes they commit more than one of these goofs in a single sentence: "That's the last straw that broke the monkey's [camel's] back"Sometimes they, well, Bender couldn't guess what they were thinking, and neither can I: "It was just like wet mud" or "I saw the same boat that you did."In each case, Bender does  his best to sort out what the person may have meant. I'm not sure that's really necessary most of the time. The sayings are funny enough without comment. Some of the comments reflect poorly on Bender himself.Occasionally, he corrects one perfectly good version of a cliche with another: "This sheet is just my hen [chicken]  scratchings" or "You can't get blood out of a rock [turnip]. These few aren't mistakes, and there's nothing especially funny about them.At least once, Bender misses an obvious correction: "They got us right between the short hairs [crosshairs]."If he can make no sense of a saying, he calls it NONSENSE! Most of those statements are certainly funny, but not necessarily nonsense.Take "knee high to an 8-foot elephant," for example. The cliche is "Knee high to a grasshopper," which would indicate something very small. Bender neglects to supply that. Substituting "8-foot elephant" is funny. Depending on the context it could be a clever twist on a familiar cliche or complete failure at cleverness. Simply adding NONSENSE! doesn't do it justice.I personally think the person who said "I couldn't putt worth my weight" actually said something hilariously clever. In putting, the lower the score the better. Even if a very small woman said that, it would mean putting at least 95! The larger the person, the more exaggerated his or her frustration over abject failure. I completely disagree with Bender's NONSENSE! on this one. But I'm very glad he included it.Also, some of his 250 entries basically duplicate each other, such as the twice-included misunderstanding that a 360-degree turn means continuing in the same direction instead of reversing course.But I am just quibbling. Any reader who thinks the sayings I have quoted are funny will enjoy this book greatly. I will be coming back to it for years to come. It's a welcome addition to my library of things to look at when I really need a laugh.Future volumes could also benefit from either some kind of logical grouping or omitting the table of contents completely.