Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 2:39:44 PM
I know I have written quite a bit about the decline of grammar and spelling (see "
The Spelling Nazi Begs to Differ" and "
In Defense of Standards"), but today I stumbled upon the most amusingly modern neologism yet. In reading reviews on Amazon I came upon someone who had written "mix and match" as "mix and mash". While obviously the result of someone trying to reproduce a cliche with which they were not entirely familiar, I find something terribly modern about the change. Mashing rather than matching somehow suits modern thought, evoking perfectly the image of a modern teen trying to force together two not-quite-compatible items.
Well, nothing more to say here. I just thought it was an amusingly apt mistake and wanted to share it.
POSTSCRIPT
I do hope that this one does not catch on though, even if it amused me. It annoys me to no end when cliches mutate into new forms. For example when "it takes two to tango" became "it takes two to tangle". It is bad enough when people use cliched metaphors without understanding them, when they use them with the wrong words they become entirely unintelligible. And that leads to people using them in even uglier ways than usual. (For an example of the opposite, my reworking of a metaphor and the dolt who criticized me for not slavishly sticking to the original see the final entry in the post "
Spelling Nazi".)