Phrases which I don’t understand (and which give me the rage)

[goodly]

‘She was murdered in broad daylight’.
What is ‘broad daylight’? Is it worse than being killed in the middle of the night?

’He was found lying in a pool of his own blood’. Well, he’s not likely to have been found in a pool of someone else’s blood, is he?

Perhaps my perimenopausal diminishing hormones are taking over but phrases like this give me the rage. Any other examples?

Same. Sounds ridiculous

"It is what it is" makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Hahahaa, its a bunch of people spinning around talking to each other

Perhaps if people looked up these phrases that give them so much irritation, they would find out that many of them have very interesting origins. A lot of them have morphed or shortened and lost their original context/meaning. It’s fascinating. No point in getting annoyed😁

But you could just google! Its origin is in the US in the 19thc where apparently someone looking for a fight would put a chip of wood on his shoulder and invite someone to knock it off, which meant you were up for a fight without having had to throw the first punch. Basically 'Come on, I dare you to provoke me.'

So it's come to have the modern meaning of someone with a grievance who is actively seeking an argument about something, eg 'X footballer was dropped from the Man City squad as a teenager and to this day, even though he's had a stellar career at PSG, when he plays them you can see he still has a chip on his shoulder.'

Yes! I mean, other than the corporate bollockology, which we should all laugh at and decline to use. If everyone in a boardroom leapt to their feet and broke into the Four Tops' 'Reach Out (I'll Be There)' every time someone said 'reach out' when they meant 'contact', it might cut down on the usage...

Respectfully, 'You've got another thing coming' is no more 'precise' or 'formal' than 'You've got another think coming' so that makes absolutely no sense. Neither is either expression 19thc.

To quote the Guardian style guide:

If you think the expression is “you’ve got another thing coming”, then you have misheard the expression “you’ve got another think coming”.

🤣🤣

Have to agree about all the corporate crap. It makes me cringe with second hand embarrassment!

Yes, although if you dig a bit deeper, the idea of the ‘escape goat’ turns out to have been due to a mistranslation of an obscure Hebrew word in early Latin bibles which was in turn rendered as ‘scape gotte’ in the first English translation by Tyndale in 1530.

https://interestingliterature.com/2025/06/scapegoat-etymology/

@yes that's also true

Language is so interesting!

It does change. I remember when "enjoy" was a verb that needed an object. People didn't just say "Enjoy!" They specified what was to be enjoyed.

This irritated me very much.

Until I started using "Enjoy!" without an object myself!

Well, even starting to hum ‘I’ll Be There’ at meetings would be a start…

Or ‘a bit unique’ 😡 It’s either unique or it isn’t.

That's the one that really annoys me along with people asking for suggestions for a unique name for their child! A name is only unique if so one else in the world shares it.

I got told, by a particularly annoying manager, we needed to “square the circle”. Still no idea what it means!

It means the manager is an annoying twat!

You’ve got it bang on!

"To be honest with you..."
This makes me think were you lying to me until now?

"No offence, but ......... " as somebody's about to say something offensive.

I am old enough to remember decimalisation. It was drummed into us that old money was “pennies” and that new money was “pence” or “new pence”.

If you still carry cash and look in your purse you will find that coins still say eg Five Pence or Twenty Pence.

I agree that these days we are more likely to say “pee” though!

Triggering/triggered.

That's interesting, but I think PP's just talking about the pluralising of the singular.

A 5p may say 5 pence on it but I would lay money (at least 1p anyway!) that a penny says one penny, not one pence.

You’re right! I have just checked and it does indeed say one penny!

I suppose I have never thought about pence being a plural before!

The first recorded usage of the phrase in printed form was apparently in 1897. Pretty sure that was in the 19th century.

My mother in law cited a lot of family members who had “thyroid”

Spill the beans is about telling a secret.
Spill the T refers to truth, but has evolved to mean gossip.