Everyone says the wrong word, thinking that they're totally correct. At Improv my friend is famous for being at an operating table and asking for a scapula or saying he submitted a survey anomalously. As a child I thought that a volleyball was "out of bounce," which made sense to me. My brother was impressed by our great grandmother's longlivity. On pages 210 and 211 of Um... Erard brings up a few other examples, such as the ever-popular "all intensive purposes." He also talks about how families have their own language in some ways, which I've definitely experienced, and from a few comments in class, it sounds like everyone has had those. In Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, John Wood writes about how his mother tells his father that he is "barking up the wrong dog," and when Wood tries to correct her, she just says that they know what she means. Sure. When I say "sawdust" my friend knows I mean "buzzkill," even though at this point I know what the real term is. That's sort of a tangent from where I was actually going originally.
With "all intensive purposes" and similar situations, I realized how important it is to understand the breakdown of words when people talk since they don't use pauses. When my parents use phrases from foreign languages, I always imagine that the entire phrase is just one word, but it doesn't matter because over time I understand the meaning from its context and use it myself. So maybe breaking speech into individual words isn't that important when it comes to phrases and terms. What's the real difference between (one of my brother's) "in lieu thereof" and "in loo vera" (except that the first makes semantic sense to those who have never heard the term before) if they both "mean" the same thing in context? Phrases or cliches that people hear over and over hardly carry their original meaning unless we add onto them. For instance, no one thinks twice about the metaphorical meaning of "he stabbed me in the back" unless we add onto it by saying something such as "he stabbed me in the back just between the shoulder blades." Suddenly the term that was just words becomes vivid, and we remember that the phrase that once had metaphorical meaning has become commonplace and almost meaningless. Sayings such as that one and "can't swing a dead cat" or "steal my thunder" are fascinating because no one thinks about their meaning anymore or question their origins. Was something once measured by swinging dead cats? Interesting... I guess the final thoughtful question I have at the end of this rambling concerns how much we actually think about what we say and hear and how often we actually say something unique. Perhaps that's the charge of creative writers, and it's up to them to create tomorrow's cliches.