Fun with Cliches

The Economist language blog takes on cliches that don't make any sense (of the paradoxical or impossible variety):

"One of the few that don't seem to be is "head over heels", which should really be "heels over head". The Word Detective says that "a few popular writers (including Davy Crockett) accidentally reversed the phrase in the late 18th and early 19th centuries", and then it stuck. "Fall between the cracks", TWD goes on to suggest, was the bastard child of "fall through the cracks" and "fall between two stools"—an accidental evolution into nonsense that, because it is close to existing phrases, nonetheless sounds sensible enough to use. ... That's probably why it's relatively rare: you need a reasonably common starter phrase that can evolve into a variant catchy enough to take root but close enough to the original and wrong in a subtle enough way for most people not to notice."

I think that there's a career in this for me: I'm great at bastardizing cliches (as Stearns constantly points out--the first one in our memory was, "Wake up and smell the roses" and that was during a sleepover with Gypsy when we were little, little kids).