this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

"Making ends meet" i use to think it was, "Making ends meat" like all you can afford is the cut of bits off of undesirable meat. I never saw it written down before, and now I feel dumb.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I had only ever see trebuchet written, i had never heard it spoken. So young me thought it was pronounced tray-bucket. I was in my 40s before i finally heard someone discussing catapult vs trebuchet and realized it was french.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well guess who's pronouncing it tray bucket from now on

(It's me)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for clarifying

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Wow you are my spirit brother. I did the same and was relentlessly mocked by friends playing Age of Empires

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

First, you get an ogre to bend a tree down to the ground. Then you fasten a bucket to the top of the tree, and put a rock in the bucket. Then you tell the ogre to let the tree loose, and the rock flies out and smashes your enemy's castle.

This is the invention of the tree-bucket.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's actually more of an onager-style catapult, not a trebuchet style one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If it doesn't use real Asiatic wild ass, it's not an onager, it's just a sparkling mangonel.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

That's a wonderful eggcorn.

I was watching a video talking about how eggcorns are an unusual category of error because they require intelligence and creativity to make. The argument was that the process goes like this:

A new word or phrase is heard, but not understood. The brain makes sense of it using existing vocabulary that has sounds that are close enough. This is accompanied an explanation for why those specific words make sense in this new context.

For example: the original eggcorn was a mishearing of acorn. Egg because it's roughly egg shaped, and corn is sometimes used to describe small objects similar to how grain can be.

All this to say, it's maybe not something to feel dumb about. Your brain did something neat.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It actually refers to tying a napkin around your neck before eating. You had to "make the ends meet" before you could eat

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

hmm might want to update wikipedia with that because they say unknown etymology.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/make_ends_meet