mixed metaphor

noun

the use in the same expression of two or more metaphors that are incongruous or illogical when combined, as in “The president will put the ship of state on its feet.”

Origin:
1790–1800

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World English Dictionary

mixed metaphor

—n
	a combination of incongruous metaphors, as when the Nazi jackboots sing their swan song

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
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Relevant Questions

What Are Mixed Metaphors...

00:10

Mixed metaphor is always a great word to know.

So is interrobang. Does it mean:

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

a gadget; dingus; thingumbob.

LEARN MORE UNUSUAL WORDS WITH WORD DYNAMO...

Example sentences

Now, there is no silver bullet, to use a mixed metaphor.

The mixed metaphor of a bucket brigade putting out a fire may be a useful way of viewing events.

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Matching Quote

"Language is simply alive, like an organism. We all tell each other this, in fact, when we speak of living languages, and I think we mean something more than an abstract metaphor. We mean alive. Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny. Some mixed words are dominated by one parent while the other is recessive. The way a word is used this year is its phenotype, but it has deeply immutable meanings, often hidden, which is its genotype.... The separate languages of the Indo-European family were at one time, perhaps five thousand years ago, maybe much longer, a single language. The separation of the speakers by migrations had effects on language comparable to the speciation observed by Darwin on various islands of the Galapagos. Languages became different species, retaining enough resemblance to an original ancestor so that the family resemblance can still be seen."

-Lewis Thomas