How Coining a Phrase Can Lead to an Inigo Montoya Moment

Have you ever coined a phrase? How you answer that question depends on what you think it means to coin a phrase. However, what you think it means might not be what someone else thinks it means, even though both of you are correct in what you think it means. Confused? So was I. 

To coin a phrase: the invention

I always thought that “to coin a phrase” meant to create or invent a new saying. One example would be when Thomas Kuhn, in his book from 1962, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” coined the phrase “paradigm shift” that since has become part of our everyday vocabulary. Another example comes from perhaps the most prolific phrase coiner of all: William Shakespeare. The Bard coined, or popularized, many new sayings in his time, such as “send him packing” and it’ll “make your hair stand on end,” and those have been repeated so much they are now considered clichés. 

To coin a phrase: the announcement

So I was confused when reading a book in which an author wrote, “It is — to coin a phrase — the greatest story ever told,” so confused that I blurted out “Dude, you didn’t coin that phrase!” Did he actually think he was the first to use “the greatest story ever told” saying? Did he write that in jest, and I just didn’t get the joke? Or did he actually not know what “to coin a phrase” meant? I felt a little embarrassed for him. 

Then, a few days later I was reading an essay by a different author who wrote, “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, to coin a phrase.” What? This guy, too? I suddenly felt like Inigo Montoya from “The Princess Bride” needing to say to both of those writers that “I do not think it means what you think it means.” Then it hit me like a ton of bricks, to coin a phrase. They used “to coin a phrase” to do what I just did: announce that I knew I used a cliché. 

How both can be correct

Turns out that my understanding and their usage of the “to coin a phrase” saying, though contradicting each other, are both correct. How can that be?  To help us answer that question and reconcile the disparity, consider what Anne Curzan (a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel) said in her “What makes a word ‘real’?” TED Talk. She explained that when the...

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