hobby horses are all sorts of things<\/a>.\u00a0 Originally, the phrase referred to an actual, concrete breed of horse.\u00a0 Clearly, one could get on a horse like that (what else would you do with it?), but just as clearly that isn’t what people are thinking of when they talk about a hobby horse as a preoccupation.<\/p>\nThe interesting thing is that despite the phrase “hobby horse” coming to mean various things you could hop aboard (velocipedes, merry-go-round horses, and, um, I suppose a “loose woman or strumpet”), and various things you couldn’t (dances, costumes, those little jobbers with a horse-head on the end of a stick) it seems a bit tricky to discern exactly which one of those secondary meanings led to what we now call a hobby.\u00a0 That stick-horse thing sort of works, as one could see a child becoming preoccupied with it, but you don’t really “get up on” those, you only pretend to.<\/p>\n
Now, to my view, Stephen basically conflated “hobby horse” and “high horse” – clearly, he was talking about not wanting to get all sneery and high-horsey in forcing his views through his characters.\u00a0 But it sort of works to conflate the two meanings, doesn’t it?\u00a0 I mean, if you have a tendency to scold people and overwhelm them about some particular point, then I suppose your hobby horse is sort of a high horse at the same time.<\/p>\n
So I suppose we can give King a pass, since the main point of a cliche is to be useful, and his use of this one is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is an odd one.\u00a0 As frequent readers know, I like to complain about the mis-use of cliches and idioms.\u00a0 I thought I’d heard one this morning, by no less august of a wordsmith as Stephen King, who, during an interview about his new book said something to the effect of “not wanting to get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grammar-gripery","category-metaphor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"hobbyhorse\"](\"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/hobbyhorse.jpg\")
This is an odd one.\u00a0 As frequent readers know, I like to complain about the mis-use of cliches and idioms.\u00a0 I thought I’d heard one this morning, by no less august of a wordsmith as Stephen King, who, during an interview about his new book said something to the effect of “not wanting to get up on my hobby horse” in his books.<\/p>\n