Headline in today’s paper: “Gay rights leader from Ark. lets his roots take the reins.”
I wonder whether people who mix metaphors like that have an impoverished imagination. Otherwise wouldn’t bizarre images leap to mind and force a rewrite?
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At least it’s not the groan-inducing puns the media is so fond of using in news opening paragraphs.
I’m convinced that most people can’t be bothered to analyze the phrases that they have learned to use; to put it another way, the attention I give to the literal meanings of words is abnormal.
Trivial example: to my ex-wife “beef-jerky” is one lexeme, not two, and it takes a great effort for her not to call turkey jerky a kind of beef-jerky.
Less trivial example: I heard someone complaining that non-citizens are treated like “second-class citizens”.
Just remembered this: “The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming.” — George Orwell