SUE DE GROOT | Rub insult into a wound worth its weight in salt or it’s in poor taste

In one of the myriad missives recently unleashed by the spin doctors of SA’s newest political party, I was flummoxed to read the phrase “to add salt to injury”.

The press officer tasked with this daily bombardment of ideology to the masses — or at least those with the patience to read every newsletter in their inbox — used this term in relation to violence against women and children.

Quoted in its entirety, the sentence read: “To add salt to injury, our country is regarded among the most violent nations of the world with the highest rate in violence against women and children. Time and time again we hear reports of heinous crimes committed against the fairest members of our society.”

The two expressions have similar meanings, so why should they not be conflated?

Leaving “fairest” aside for attack on a sunnier day, what is this new idiom “to add salt to injury”?

A quick internet search revealed it is not new at all. Thousands of people have used this phrase. Whether they were aware that it is at best a mixed metaphor and at worst a big fat error is uncertain.

I believe, as any sane person must, that every language and its idioms must constantly evolve and change. We should never be all supercilious about something that is not exactly “correct” if it adds its own brand of revolutionary rightness to the way we use words.

“Adding salt to injury” is a perfect example of why such latitude should exist. Pedants might call this a mashup of two metaphors: “adding insult to injury” and “rubbing salt into the wound”. But the two expressions have similar meanings, so why should they not be conflated?

The happy byproduct of my investigation into salt and injuries was the discovery of a new word I should have heard before but had not. None of us can ever hope to know everything, no matter how much we might posture as know-it-alls.

The new word I discovered is not a “real” word as such but I’d be happy to take a bet that it will soon be included in mainstream dictionaries. The word is “malaphor” (pronounced mal-a-for) and it describes the conjoining of metaphors or idioms in ways that give old sayings a fresh new gleam.

A combination of “aphorism” (a wise saying) and “malapropism” (a mangled expression named after Mrs Malaprop, the character who constantly got things wrong in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals), a malaphor mixes two recognised idioms in a way that either makes sense or is funny, or both.

A man called Dave has started an entire website dedicated to malaphors. He calls these “unintentional blended idioms and phrases” and has two as his tagline: “it’s the cream of the cake” and “don’t rock the trough”.

Dave has been collecting malaphors for years. He traces the origin of the term to an article published in the US in the 1970s, and among his favourite idiominations are: “I was out like a rock”; “we’ll burn those bridges when we get to them”; “first off the bat”; and “airbrushed under the carpet”.

Adding salt to injury features on Dave’s list of malaphors, as it happens. He found more than 2.3-million hits for this “conflation of ‘to rub salt in the wound’ and ‘to add insult to injury’”.

Dave must have a better search engine than I do (mine turned up only a few hundred thousand results) but we agree that both phrases mean “to deliberately make someone’s misfortune or unhappiness worse”.

I have written before about eggcorns and mondegreens, both sources of immense linguistic delight. Malaphors provide yet another avenue for puncturing the pompous way we sometimes look at language. They make us think a little harder about why we say the things we do, and whether it really matters if we say them differently.

I’m still not convinced by the policies of SA’s newly registered party, but I have to commend the vigour with which they communicate. No wind blows ill all the time, and that which might be incorrect can perhaps enrich our interactions. Put that in your pen and smoke it.