Author: Kirk

“… wearing her pool gargles …”

Mispronunciations

I heard about this expression last Saturday at a party.

Problem:
The fourth word is incorrect.

Explanation:
My friend Nickie F. sent me more information about this expression.

She said that a friend was describing her daughter’s solution to a bath-time dilemma when the friend said, “She had gotten so tired of getting shampoo in her eyes that the next night, I walked into the bathroom and found her in the tub wearing her pool gargles to keep the shampoo out.”

As all readers should recognize, the word after “pool” should be “goggles” instead.

The speaker apparently was accustomed to mispronouncing “goggles” as “gargles”.

Sometimes one must “squint one’s ears” at what is being heard to identify what the speaker intended to say.

In this case, though, no ear squinting is required.

Solution:
“… wearing her pool goggles …”

“a quality-built Ford”

Adjectives

I heard this on TV the other day.

Problem:
The modifier “quality-built” is truly meaningless.

Explanation:
I heard “a quality-built Ford” spoken by a narrator during a television commercial run by Ford the other day.

When I blogged two months ago about “a quality product”, I pointed out that the word “quality” was meaningless in that phrase.

Ford was trying to say that it makes high-quality vehicles.

But “high-quality-built” is awkward.

The solution comes from appreciating that high-quality vehicles are vehicles that are built well.

Solution:
“a well-built Ford”

“If worst comes to shove, …”

General

I heard about this expression last Saturday at a party.

Problem:
The second word is incorrect.

Explanation:
My friend Nickie F. sent me more information about this expression.

She said that a co-worker was discussing possible scenarios to resolve an ongoing HR issue when the co-worker said, “If worst comes to shove, then that is what we’ll have to do.”

The second word, as many readers will recognize, should be “push” instead.

The expression “If push comes to shove”, according to Answers.com, “comes from rugby, where, after an infraction of rules, forwards from each team face off and push against one another until one player can kick the ball to a teammate and resume the game.”

And its figurative use — that is, its use outside of rugby — dates back to the 1950s.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “If push comes to shove” — 155,000 matches
  • “If worst comes to shove” — 344 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct expression versus the incorrect expression by a ratio of 451-to-1, which is excellent.

Solution:
“If push comes to shove, …”