I thought "cakewalk" was a clever American amalgamation of "a piece of cake" and "a walk in the park".
Turns out it's actually related to slavery, so probably doesn't count.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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When referring to a difficult task: "That's a tough road to hold", or "a tough road to hoe", or "a tough road to [travel on]" or "a tough road to... [trails off awkwardly...]", or just "a tough road".
It's a tough row to hoe.
It's an agricultural metaphor. The row is a line of dirt in a field where you plant seeds. You use a hoe to dig the lines, remove weeds, and create little holes where you drop the seeds. Hoeing may be difficult if the soil is too hard or too full of rocks and weeds. Such a row would be a tough one to hoe.
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I always liked "Hindsight is 50/50"
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater else you'll end up with a wet, critically injured baby.
I don't know about the "becomes commonplace" part, but mangled idioms are generally called "malapropisms".
So, lots of examples, but not much on your question about terminology. In looking around a bit, I couldn't find a single specific term for a malapropism that "sticks," but you could fairly describe it as a form semantic drift driven by catachresis, thought the latter seems more common in literary criticism or philosophy than in linguistics.
catachresis
Ha! Here you are answering the actual question but nobody cares!
Amazing. I had never seen this word before.
Even then, I can't quite find a single Linguistics term for this phenomenon, where it becomes a thing of its own or even replaces the original. 'Eggcorn' and 'Malaphor' seem to be pretty decent casual terms.
Almost thought you'd done one yourself there with this "even then"! But I was thinking of even still (from even so). Which BTW is probably in my top 3 most hated malaphors or catachreses or whatever they are.
Current pet peeve: "to step foot on". Facepalm! Just coz somebody misheard "set" doesn't make "step foot" grammatical. And yet here we are.