I only read a few daily comics these days. One of them is "Crankshaft," about an elderly school bus driver and his family, living outside Toledo, Ohio.
One of crotchety Ed Crankshaft's endearing qualities is his use of malapropisms. However, the strip that ran yesterday included a usage error, spoken by a different character, which I don't think was intended to be funny.
It's just a mistake:
You can be "called out" or you can be "called on the carpet," but up until now, I've never heard of someone being "called out on the carpet."
This mash-up of idioms does not appear in my somewhat outdated volume of Garner's Modern American Usage. Searching it turns up just one person asking about it, and the response given refers only to "called on the carpet," without acknowledging the fact that the questioner had added the other words.
So it's not a thing... yet. I hope it doesn't become one.
1 comment:
Google AI says it’s real, but I say Google AI is hallucinating. The Ngram Viewer shows it as way, way below the usual idiom.
Post a Comment