08.24.08
Pig in a poke in the eye
“Do you want a headline for that savings-bank story?” a colleague emailed me the other day. We were working on a magazine article that employed a herd of piggy-banks as a photo illustration, and he continued, “Maybe something pig-related, like ‘A Pig on a Post’?”
“It’s ‘pig in a poke’—a poke being a type of bag,” I replied in mild correction of his idiotism—and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Honest. I indeed used idiotism here in the nicest possible way, as a synonym of idiom. The first recorded use of idiotism was in 1588, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, preceding the word’s use as a synonym of idiocy by a hair of something’s chinny-chin-chin (first recording, 1592). And 1913’s Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, lists the “idiomatic” meaning as its primary meaning. Idiom, idiot and idiosyncracy have roots that stretch back to Greek words indicating singularity or peculiarity.
Idiotism-synonymous-with-idiom is now obsolete, but perhaps it should be revived when idiomatic cliches get mangled as they so often do these days, whether intentionally (as I suspect my colleague was doing) or unintentionally. When “toe the line” becomes “tow the line,” we are crossing the line from idiom to idiotism. So, too, when “wreaking havoc” becomes “reeking havoc” or “wrecking havoc,” or when “for all intents and purposes” becomes “for all intensive purposes.”
But perhaps the greatest idiotism is when “Pig in a poke” becomes a pig in a post—a blog post.
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pippen said,
August 26, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Idioms do change as they get farther from their original connection. How many of us know that “poke” used to mean “bag”? I was just reading that “part and parcel” was actually “part and (or?) particle” (Emerson used “or”), which is rather different (smaller — part– and larger — parcel, vs. larger — part- vs. smaller — particle). I suspect that happened because “parcel” is so much easier to say, and anyway, everyone knew it meant “entirely”.