how to classify?

[James A. Landau <JJJRLandau@netscape.com>]

Heard in the lab:

"I don't want to beat it with a dead horse"

How do we classify this?

I don't think it's an eggcorn, since it is not a plausible substitution of one word/phrase for another.

Is it a malaprop?  "the use of a word sounding somewhat like the one intended but ludicrously wrong in the context" (MWCD10)  It doesn't seem to fit that definition.



>From the same speaker: "he hit the learning curve and bounced back".  This one is simply a piling of one metaphor onto another to create noovel imagery, like "piling Pelion on Odessa".

     - Jim Landau

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