When metaphors, adages, maxims, and idioms become clichés and words sound similar, it’s easy for people to mix them up, and the resulting jumble can add a touch of levity to otherwise heavy conversations. As the Wall Street Journal reports, that’s exactly why recently retired Ford executive Mike O’Brien decided to keep track of groan/laugh-worthy goofs across several dry-erase boards, data which was then turned into a spreadsheet.
Collected from 2014 up to O’Brien’s retirement last month, the recorded mixed metaphors and malapropisms reportedly tally in at 2,229, and they range from mildly amusing to knee-slappingly hilarious. A digital compilation was O’Brien’s parting gift to colleagues, but the boards certainly weren’t a secret operation. As the Wall Street Journal writes:
The list became so known—and feared—that one executive cursed O’Brien’s name in a meeting after tripping up on an expression. Violators could appeal their inclusion but success was rare. And nobody was above a grammatical roasting: Ford CEO Jim Farley twice made the list.
Indeed, this certainly seems like an equal-opportunity repository, and O’Brien himself earned a podium on the list, squeaking in at number three. As you might expect, not everyone was reportedly thrilled to end up on the board, and some data was reportedly anonymized, but the side-quest seemed to become something of an office tradition.
While we don’t have a full picture of everything on the list, several linguistic pause moments published in the Wall Street Journal stick out to me, like the hilariously redundant “I’m not trying to beat a dead horse to death,” the definitely not food safety-approved “Too many cooks in the soup,” and the unintentionally macabre “He’s going to be so happy he’ll be like a canary in a coal mine!” That last one reportedly came courtesy of marketing manager Mike Murphy, leader of the board.
Oh, and there’s more. Photos in the Wall Street Journal depict the extensive collection of boards, full of sayings like the strange and off-putting “Chew this elephant off,” the amusing “Mazel tov cocktail,” both “smartest knife in the drawer” and “smartest tool in the shed,” the trippy “I hear an aftertaste,” and the borderline medieval “flush it out the window.” [Ed note: I’m down the rabbit hole on this now. “No holds bar;” “If it ain’t broke, don’t break it;” “Point of view standpoint” … so much gold! – Pete]
Regardless, recording an infraction certainly seemed like it could shift the tone of things, especially when the moment of spoken strangeness comes from a division director. As the Wall Street Journal wrote:
Once in a meeting, Ford’s then-head of U.S. sales, Andrew Frick, was making a point about a sales promotion: “We have a better program, but the competition has more foot on the ground,” he said. Sensing the stumble, he looked up at O’Brien, laughing. “Wait, is it ‘feet on the ground’? Dammit O’Brien!”
Still, the board of words seems to have had just the right sort of internal impact. As former Ford division director and current S&P Global enterprise business executive director Scott Cauvel wrote on LinkedIn:
While some could see this as a fluff piece, or even possibly more negatively as a waste or a drain on productivity at a historic but often-rebuilding automaker, I’d tell you it was exactly the opposite. I watched and participated first-hand as this actively, routinely and positively affected team morale, collaboration, commaradrie and productivity. This levity bonded everyone together … to work harder, to work smarter, and along the way, find a deeper appreciation & respect for their teammates.
As far as largely harmless ways to keep one’s self amused in the office go, this has to be one of the best. If I had a list like this, I’d always know I could turn to it for a chuckle, and sometimes a little light-hearted laughter is exactly what you need.
Top graphic credit: Ford
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My favorite one to use when I worked at Ford was “You pay what you get for!”. I used this quote probably 20 times, before one person noticed and said something lol
About 15 years ago the expressions “hand off to so-and-so” and “toss it over to so-and-so” were far too common. I, Andrew, was in a meeting with a fellow for whom English was a second language. He was quite good, but with the occasional entertaining oddity. Such as when he told the group that he was going to “toss off to Andrew.” Cue a room of people gagging as they suppress laughter…
One I like to use, applies a lot around where I work, and with respect to any “upgrades”:
If it ain’t broke, fix it till it is.
I had something like that… CTO asked, “Are we upgrading XYZ?” My answer was, “We’re updating it. Whether it’s an upgrade remains to be seen.”
I was in a management meeting of some sort, and the presenter kept saying “Pacific” instead of “Specific.” I spent a lot of that meeting trying to cover my face every time she said it; I didn’t dare laugh because she worked in HR.
‘It’s always darkest before the DAMNIT!
WHO LEFT THE LEGOS OUT?’
I still keep the list from some D&D games from over 25 years ago…
One sample: “They are horrifying creatures, halfway between a man and a human”
As of late I’m starting to think that one might just be accurate. 😉
Not sure if it quite fits in here, but I hung up a sign in the office that says, “It gets worse before it gets worse”.
We had one of those list at one of my former employers. It was always a good time when we’d go through the notebook with all those quotes!
> commaradrie
…
One from my father:
“In one ear and out the other like a hotdog.”
!?!?!
Lizard anatomy is weird, okay?
At a meeting a manager once told us not to worry about layoffs. We would lose enough employees through nutrition.
So how was the company café food anyway?
Worked at too many places with a “wheel of death” vending machine… and a microwave oven.
After living in Michigan, working for Ford, I think we did lose some employees through nutrition (or lack there of)
I was being dropped off by the airport parking shuttle at my very old and shabby looking car with failing clear coat. The driver, who’s native tongue was not English, said:
“You have used all the money you gave for that car.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Ronald Reagan is (likely mis-) quoted: “Before I start to speak, I’d like to say something.”
I don’t recall any malapropisms but I did zing a manager who said “we should move up the food chain” by asking if we should become apex predators?
One of the slogans I had printed and posted in my cube long ago was “Idiots will always outwit the idiot proofers”. I titled it “Carver’s Idoit Proof Axiom”. It took me months to notice the misspelling.
I believe this is an offshoot of Murphey’s Law.
Design a system that even an idiot can use and only an idiot will use it.
“Murphy’s Law”, no “e” – not sure what this proves. 🙂
Proof of law.
Also known as Muphry’s Law.
We’re gonna save money……no matter how much it costs.
Have your star. I always said at my last employer (contract now) “We are far too busy to get more efficient”
Yes!! That approach dovetails in with “we lose just a little bit on each one, but we’ll make it up with volume.” At least that’s what they said at the jumbo shrimp factory.
Oof, I feel that one. There’s a push to make the work areas more efficient by organizing tools in foam cutouts, meanwhile we just moved our warehouse/shipping dept 30 miles from the production facility.
The last employer (new ownership) moved everything around in the building probably 3 times in 3 years. It was just chaos.
That is an actual thing I’ve seen happen at a couple places I’ve worked at.
I work in Audio Visual as a contractor now, but all the integrators do it.
Not a malaprop, but there was a whiteboard at a customer site where we had written:
Learn by doing
Do by learning
Do be do be do
My mom had a similar tshirt (the philosophers are likely credited wrongly here):
To be is to do – Plato
To do is to be – Socrates
Do be do be do – Sinatra
In a rather tense meeting, our manager announced “The line is on their butt” when he meant to say “Their butt is on the line”. Hilarity did not ensue until we were out of earshot.
Near the end of a large group meeting where an agreement was reached. A scribe was assigned to write it up. He promised to try to capture every “twat and jittle of the agreement”. Laughter was stifled for approximately two seconds.
My favorite is “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
I say that one maybe a bit too often. Sometimes I wonder if my coworkers wonder if I know that I’m getting it wrong.
Same here, it’s a favorite of mine but I’m not sure anyone gets the joke there. Maybe they just don’t think I’m funny.
I like the wrinkle of “We’ll burn that bridge while we’re crossing it.”
Ouch. Kind of like shooting yourself in the hand.
I love that one, and have used it often, thinking I was clever, until one day I realized I didn’t invent it.
Oh well, I still use it
These are great! One that I hear pretty often is “Walk the walk” instead of “Walk the talk”.
I thought it was walking the walk and talk the talk
I do love a good malaphor/malaprop. The most used example for me is “Whatever floats your goat”.
I’m also fond of “it’s not rocket surgery”.
I use “it’s not rocket surgery” intentionally.
I use both intentionally. Just like “we’ll burn those bridges when we come to them”.
Rocket surgery can get pretty intense. The outer skin of many a liquid fueled ICBM was used both structurally and as a wall of a fuel tank. If you drop a wrench, run! Red fuming nitric acid, nitrogen tetroxide and other rocket fuels love to oxidize violently. Many a rule was written in blood for how to wrench on those beasts.
I’m so glad I managed to dig up a pdf copy of Ignition!. Little excerpt:
Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and
WFNA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go
up, when Uncle Milty warned, “Hold it —the acid valve is leaking!”
“Go ahead —fire anyway!” Paul ordered.
I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started backing gently away, like so many cats with wet feet. Howard Streim opened his mouth to protest, but as he said later, “I saw that dog-eating grin on Doc’s face and shut it again,” and somebody pushed the button. There was a little flicker of yellow flame, and then a brilliant blue-white flash and an ear-splitting crack. The lid to the chamber went through the ceiling (we found it in the attic some weeks later), the viewports vanished, and some forty pounds of high-grade optical glass was reduced to a fine powder before I could blink.
I need to re-read that book! The chemistry went right over my head. The clear writing carried me through. Back in the days when chemists needed a lot of bravery to see what the devil’s brews they concocted would actually do. No computer simulation. The work they did helped make those simulations!
“If you drop a wrench, run!”
Ah yes, nothing like the prospect of the explosion of a fully fueled ICBM topped with a 9 MT hydrogen bomb to get those legs moving:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion
The one silver lining of this incident is it proved once and for all that the warhead safeties WORK!
Guy willfully ignores safety regulations saying what tools are allowed around Big Explodey Rocket. Brings unauthorized tools, which proceed to break. Broken tool breaks Big Explodey Rocket, which explodes. There seems to be a theme here…../s
Wife was an accountant in a lab that sent instruments into space to measure shit. She had one rocket scientist who had to be at a meeting in DC and they got off a plane in LA called her and asked her to fix it. Definitely a rocket scientist.
I knew an Air Force maintenance trainer for the Minuteman III. He said the most terrifying sound was an 18-year-old, fresh from the farm, dropping a wrench into the silo. The echoing ‘clang, clang, clang…’ was unnerving.
“it doesn’t take rocket appliances to figure that out!” – Ricky
Sadly I used to hate “It is what it is”. Damn Belichick.
A good phrase to irk someone is “It will be done when it’s finished”.
I once saw someone on Reddit write “They may not be …(I don’t remember), but they are sure going like they’re.
Someone, of course mentioned how they never heard an abbreviation being used at the end of a sentence, to which someone replied with my favorite adage, the far superior:
“It’s what it’s.”
“I’m just talking out loud…” No kidding, I can hear you talking
I love “Is a bear Polish? Does the pope shit in the woods?”
My grandfather used to say that all the time, cracked me up as a kid.