Cover of We'll Burn That Bridge When We Get to It: four friends around a green card table

A field guide to malaphors

We'll Burn That Bridge When We Get to It

A Field Guide to Malaphors, and the Beautiful Mess Inside Your Head

by Levi JA Wilson

"It's not rocket surgery." Somebody says it in a meeting. Nobody blinks. The point lands, and one person at the table starts grinning and cannot stop. That is a malaphor: two idioms that collide in one sentence and somehow still make sense. This book collects 148 of them.

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Full color, 254 pages. Sold and shipped by Amazon.

Every entry is a specimen.

Each malaphor gets the full treatment, in five parts.

  1. The Parents. The two idioms that collided.
  2. Where They Came From. The real origin of each, with the popular myths called out by name.
  3. How They Collided. Why these two, out of every idiom in your head, ended up in one sentence.
  4. The Scorecard. Sense-o-Meter, Mental Image and Seamlessness, totaled into a tier: Bronze Bear, Silver Lining, or the rare Golden Pope.
  5. The strip. Four old friends at a game table who never let one slide.
Comic strip, two panels. Gus points at a model bridge on the table while Teddy counts. Gus: “Easy, Rembrandt. Hubris. The Greeks wrote whole plays about it. Don't count your bridges before you cross them.” Teddy, with three bridges in front of him: “There are three. Is counting hubris now?” Walt, holding his mug: “In those plays, Gus, the man giving that speech dies first.”

Don't count your bridges before you cross them.

The Parents: Don't count your chickens before they hatch + Don't cross that bridge until you come to it

How They Collided: No shared word, but a shared frame, "don't [verb] your [X] before [Y]." The chickens dropped out and the bridges took their place. The advice is still sound. It is just no longer about poultry.

Bronze Bear

Meet the table.

Four old friends, one game night, and no malaphor goes unpunished.

  • Gus, bald with a big mustache, his shirt dotted with rain, waving a hand mid-sentence.

    Gus

    Says most of the malaphors. Has never noticed a single one.

  • Teddy, curly-haired and wide-eyed, holding a drink at the table.

    Teddy

    Pictures every blend literally, so you will see the Pope in the woods.

  • Pete, in round glasses, writing in his notebook at the table.

    Pete

    Writes every one down in a pocket notebook. Can read back what you said in March.

  • Walt, gray-haired with glasses on his forehead, holding a die and a coffee mug.

    Walt

    Knows where every idiom came from. Or thinks he does.

Comic strip, two panels. Gus points at a square on the board. Gus: “One move, two bonuses. Economics. Kill two birds in the bush.” Teddy pictures Gus holding a stone beside a bush. Teddy: “No birds. Just a rock and a hunch.” Walt: “It turns up in a 1655 quarrel with Hobbes...” Pete: “Nasty, brutish, and short. Like his plans.”Comic strip, four panels. A big box sits on the table. Gus: “Fine. I bought the big one. Two hundred miniatures. A man needs a hobby. The 800-pound elephant in the room.” Teddy pictures a baby elephant in a party hat sitting on a chair. Walt: “Where does an eight-hundred-pound gorilla sleep, Gus?” Gus: “Anywhere it wants. Usually during your stories.” Teddy: “He's only a baby. He's wearing a party hat. We're keeping him.” Pete: “That's what Gus said about the last six.”

Under the jokes, real science.

Chapter 1 explains why your brain does this, using decades of research on slips of the tongue: how idioms are stored as whole chunks, why two phrases with the same meaning race each other to your mouth, and why the loser sometimes leaks into the winner. Short "Brain Bit" sidebars teach one more idea at a time.

The origins were fact-checked against historical dictionaries and phrase archives. Where an origin is disputed, the book says so. Where a popular story is false, it says that too, with some pleasure.

The chapters sort malaphors by how they collide

  1. Same Meaning, Different Words. The classics, plus blends so good they replaced their parents.
  2. Same Shape, Same Beat. Idioms built on the same frame.
  3. The Pivot Word. One shared word lets a sentence switch tracks halfway through.
  4. Shared Imagery. Animals, kitchens, bodies and weather, where the pictures do the blending.
  5. Crossed Wires. Parents that disagree. The funniest collisions in the book.
  6. Multi-Car Pileups. Three or more idioms at once.
  7. On Purpose. The deliberate ones, and everything credited to Yogi Berra.

Read it front to back, or one entry while the pasta water boils.

For word lovers, trivia fans, and anyone who has ever sat through a meeting.

Buy the paperback on AmazonOr get the Kindle edition
Author
Levi JA Wilson
Format
Full-color paperback, 6 x 9 in. Kindle eBook.
Pages
254
ISBN
9798164249311 (paperback)
Publisher
Independently published
Published
October 2026

Heard one in the wild? Send us your malaphor and it could be in the next volume.