Mangled metaphors: Carrot pudding, anyone?

How many times have you heard someone say "the proof is in the pudding" to punctuate a point?

Gwen Ifill of PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) in the United States, when asked how she could be neutral as moderator of the Biden-Palen debate because she had written a book about Barack Obama and other rising black leaders, said the proof of her neutrality would be "in the pudding," i.e., in her conduct during the debate. In another instance, the embattled chair of the Smithsonian Institution Board of Regents, also in the U.S., recently defended his performance with that same expression.

But why is the proof in the pudding? How will you extract it? Could be messy. What's the point of this metaphor? The point becomes clearer when the expression is restored to its original fullness: The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Aha! You can brag about the recipe or cite the people who have raved about it, but the real test will come only after you have served it, and people will then make their own judgment about its merits.

In the mangled pudding metaphor, something has been subtracted. More commonly, things get added or substituted:

• He's a little green behind the ears. (He's either wet behind the ears, or he's green.)
• It's a walk in the cake. (It's a walk in the park, maybe, or a piece of cake.)
• It's not rocket surgery. (Choose one: rocket science or brain surgery.)

During the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, a Globe and Mail story focused on trademark use and misuse: “In a pedestrian underpass by Tiananmen Square, for instance, peddlers are doing a landslide business hawking non-sanctioned Olympic flags for a paltry 16 cents.” Landslide business? No place to go but downhill. The common expression is land-office business, probably referring to the rush to claim land in the westward migration in the United States in the nineteenth century.

And now on to carrot and stick. I always thought it was carrot on a stick, referring to the practice of tying a carrot to a long stick and dangling it in front of a donkey just out of reach. The donkey would move toward the carrot, thus moving whatever was riding or tied to the donkey as well. So the idea of the carrot on a stick was applied to temptations or potential rewards that could be kept just out of reach until a certain result was achieved.

Playing such a trick on a donkey could be construed as unfair, or even cruel (especially if the poor donkey never got to eat the carrot), but not nearly so cruel as beating the donkey with the stick if it eschewed the carrot offer. The carrot-OR-stick interpretation, evidently held by many respectable people, is that one can motivate another with a positive reward (a kind of carrot) or the threat of some kind of coercion or punishment, whichever seemed to offer the promise of the desired result. This seems to move the expression into a darker and more threatening interpretation.

What's your view?

What are your favourite mangled metaphors?

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