He cut me a favor

In season 2, episode 3 of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano’s teenage daughter, Meadow, has a party that gets out of control and requires police intervention. Tony gets her out of trouble with the police and says to her as they’re driving home: “Just lucky I knew that cop, so he cut me a favor.” This is a congruent conflation of “cut (one) a break” and “did (one) a favor”, both meaning to do something that makes a situation easier for someone else. My guess is that Tony was thinking of literally cutting up someone. Not sure, but The Sopranos is a treasure trove of malaphors. I devoted a whole section to them in my book, “He Smokes Like a Fish and other Malaphors”. Some of the best are “We’re in a f**king stagmire”, “keep your eyes on the tiger”, and my favorite, “we have a few dark sheep in the family”. https://malaphors.com/2013/07/02/we-have-a-few-dark-sheep-in-the-family/

Props to Barry Eigen for hearing this one and sending it in. I will add it to the Sopranos section!. Barry also noted that the syntax of this malaphor reminded him when hewas kid growing up in NYC. He would call up to his mother (on the 4th floor of an apartment building): “Throw me out the window a ball.” No defenestration there of course.