I got by by the squeak of my teeth
Posted: October 23, 2014 Filed under: BODY PARTS, tooth | Tags: by the skin of our teeth, congruent conflations, expressions, humor, language, malaphor, malaphors, mixed idioms, squeaked by, squeaky clean, words 2 CommentsThis is a congruent conflation of “by the skin of my teeth” and “squeaked by”, both meaning just barely. My teeth seem to squeak when I rub my fingers over them, particularly after a good dental cleaning, so I can see where the speaker might be confused. The phrase “squeaky clean” used to describe clean teeth (and other things) also comes to mind. All in all, I think this malaphor is an improvement over the idioms noted above, don’t you? A big squeaky clean thank you to Beverly Rollins Sheingorn VanDerhei (now there’s a mouthful!) for sending this one in!
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This is a funny example of a mixed metaphor, but I wonder how the phrase “by the skin of my teeth” came about, since teeth don’t have skin.
Doobster, Skin of my teeth is a phrase from the Bible. In Job 19:20, the King James Version of the Bible says, “My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.” In the Geneva Bible, the phrase is rendered as “I haue escaped with the skinne of my tethe.”