The Death Nail

I enjoy mondegreens quite a lot, you know, misheard phrases like intensive purposes instead of intents and purposes, pacific instead of specific, deep seeded instead of deep-seated, and I collect them when I catch them in the wild. I most like how they often make more sense in our contemporary context than the orignal expressions.

My favorites are human beans instead of human beings, and taken for granite instead of taken for granted. In both of these cases, the misheard is more concrete, and in that sense one might even say it is an improvement over the original. Who wants to be treated like a slab of cold granite, after all?

Just heard another one that I want to record: death nail in place of death knell. What is a knell, anyway? No. His refusal to update his skills was the death nail in his career. Awesome!