A malaphor (mixed metaphor) generator to mint new idioms.
A malaphor is an error in which two figures of speech are merged, producing an often nonsensical result.
For example, we can take these idioms:
- "It's not brain science"
- "It's not rocket surgery"
...and recombine them to create the malaphor, "It's not rocket surgery."
Here's another example:
- "Burn your bridges" (idiom)
- "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it" (idiom)
..."We'll burn that bridge when we get to it" (malaphor!)
At the time of writing this, there is no generator that generates malaphors from any corpus of data. The only work in this space uses a small handful of predefined idioms to generate semi-random recombinations.
This generator scrapes Wiktionary's corpus of 8000+ idioms and 1,000+ proverbs, which are constantly being updated.
The scope of this allows for more possible malaphors to be evaluated, and for criteria to 'grade' options before showing the best ones to the user.
These malaphors are entirely novel, which makes them fun - every new generation is a roll of the dice!
This is a working version of a command-line program that builds a local text file and an SQLite database, then generates simple malaphors from these.
I'm in the process of a) using the database to refine the text output to better reflect semantic content, and b) building a front end for the program so it is accessible to users without having to download this code and re-scrape the data.
Here are some of the script's better malaphors:
The idioms being merged:
- clear cut
- cut and dried
The resulting malaphor:
clear cut and dried
The idioms being merged:
-
strike while the iron is hot
-
make hay while the sun shines
The resulting malaphor:
make hay while the iron is hot
The idioms being merged:
-
put one's name in the hat
-
throw one's hat in the ring
The resulting malaphor:
throw one's name in the hat