[Ads-l] Idiom backfire

[Mark Mandel]

Here are a couple of items posted in a blog conversation by Ace Lightning,
a Dreamwidth user; reposted here by her permission:

When I was first learning Wicca <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicca>, my
mother objected to the idea of a whole bunch of people going skyclad
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyclad_%28Neopaganism%29> together - and
she said, "If we were supposed to run around without clothes, we'd be born
that way!" - and then realized what she'd said. We had a good laugh about
that.

I've got another one like that. When my son was a teenager, we were having
a typical adult/teenager disagreement, and I was very angry, and I started
to say, "Why, you little son-of-a-bitch!" - and caught myself. After that
we were both laughing too hard to argue any more.

Is there any study or collection of anecdotes like these, in which a
speaker uses an idiom or trope, which then "backfires" as the speaker or a
hearer recognizes it as absurd in the current context?

Mark Mandel

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org