"You can't have your cake and eat it" The older form was flipped: "you can't eat your cake and have it" They both can mean about the same, but the older form makes it much clearer - if you've eaten your cake, you no longer have it. But you could have your cake, then eat it.
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Reminds me of that story where a fellow on the lake was chilly and tried to start a small fire in the boat, but it just burned a hole through it and he had to swim to shore.
Just goes to show you...
"You can't have your kayak and heat it, too."
People that think "y" in online gaming means "yeah" instead of "why".
The only one that continues to bug me is using "an" instead of "a" before a word that starts with a consonant sound. I especially dislike the phrase "an historic" (as in "it was an historic victory") which has bafflingly been deemed acceptable. Unless you're a cockney, it should be "a historic". The rule is to use "an" if the word starts with a vowel sound, and "a" otherwise. IMO.
I’ve mentioned this here before but in the UK “an historic” is written because we are slowly dropping the letter “h” at the front of words from pronunciation. UK people often say “an ‘istoric” so it kinda makes sense… but looks clumsy.
On accident, it is by accident. 🤬
To "step foot on". I don't care that millennial journalists are now sullying the literal NYT with this, it's WRONG. It's to set foot on. To SET foot on.
It's "I didn't taste it, let alone finish it." not "I didn't finish it, let alone taste it.". Not those exact words, of course. People get it wrong more often than not IME. The wrong version never makes sense, and it always trips me up.
Those mis-stated phrases are called eggcorns. They’re a fascinating contributor to the evolution of language.
The term egg corn (later contracted into one word, eggcorn) was coined by professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum in September 2003 in response to an article by Mark Liberman on the website Language Log, a group blog for linguists.[5] In his article, Liberman discussed the case of a woman who had used the phrase egg corn for acorn, and he noted that this specific type of substitution lacked a name. Pullum suggested using egg corn itself as a label.[6]
Ah! I'll read this over dinner.
Bone apple tea! :p
The "positive anymore" is a vile grammatical abomination spawning from the Midwest US.
Normally using the word anymore has a negative tone to it (I don't eat meat anymore) . Except when used in this manner which seems to be when they should instead be saying currently or nowadays.
I find it viscerally unappealing.
Some weirdos write decades as possessive. Writing "90's" implies that there's a 90 that owns something.
Idiocracy is literally a documentary anymore
This is another one. "Anymore" only works when paired with a negative, like: Idiocracy is not fiction, anymore.
Imagine if you asked whether the store has AA batteries, and the clerk says, "We have anymore." In contrast, "we don't have anymore" works.
I feel like the vast majority of people online use "yay or nay" instead of "yea or nay".