Frederick O'Loughlin

The Malaphor Maker

A tool in the browser for generating Malaphors

Having previously dabbled with a Markov chain algorithm - which I used to create original tweets about artificial intelligence. I was looking around for other use cases.

A Malaphor is the name given to phrases that have been mashed up. So if you cross over two expressions it becomes a malaphor. These are actually great fun and there are some especially funny ones:

Its not rocket surgery

We'll burn that bridge when we get to it

You can lead a horse to water but you can't teach it to fish

And so on. But it occured to me that this is a perfect task for a Markov chain. So I set about buidling a dataset of phrases and idioms, and have actually deployed the results. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get a good one. Also as there are many english phrases that are in one way or another terrible, this does come through. So you have been warned.

Enjoy!

(Photo credit Patrick Tomasso, via Unsplash)

Let me play with the Malaphor Maker!