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?

"Me either" when they mean "Me neither".

Isn't that from old English where wīf meant female? Man just used to mean person, not male specifically, but of course male= default human 🤔 especially in the middle ages, and wīfman (female person) is the origin of the modern word woman...

This thread makes me sad. Losing flowery phrases is the active enshittification of our beautiful language.

Once it's all fallen out of use, we will all sound like ai chat bots. Dystopian hell.

I for one will gird my loins, beat the bland autocorrect overlord, and sally forth to implement as many coquettish and verbose turns of phrase as I possibly can.

Some intangibly esoteric meanings and odd local vernacular may one day be all we have left of creative and individual speech. Don't let it fall by the wayside 💪

I know it's pedantic.. But when did we start saying "take a look" as opposed to "have a look"? Surely "take" is more American? The way the woman says it on the local morning news makes my blood boil.

To be fair, one of Spinal Tap's many ill-fated drummers dies from choking on someone else's vomit.

My husband rages at - Live on stage - the retort being they wouldn’t be dead.

I think the problem is when phrases become cliched and lose their meaning somewhat - that degrades as language just as much as losing bits of it ?

"In <insert number> <insert days/months/year> time" e.g. in 3 days time

The above nouns are exclusive to time.

Adding the word "time" after use of these is redundant.

I hate it.

The overwhelming majority of these phrases which ‘enrage’ people are because they don’t understand them, or haven’t realised the expression is truncated!

Obvious exception for the corporate nonsense-speak, but that’s just people who think ‘Let’s put a pin in it’ sounds more gung-ho and initiative-taking than ‘Look, I can’t face dealing with this now — let’s ignore it till Tuesday.’

Mind you, ‘gung ho’ is actually based on a senior US marine misunderstanding a Chinese expression during WW2, thinking it meant ‘work together’ when it literally meant ‘industrial collective’. He used it in a motivational speech, and adopted it as a motto for his battalion, and it crept into use meaning ‘overly enthusiastic’ and was popularised by a film.

Most people are complaining about the mangling of traditional sayings or the coopting of ridiculous management or therapy speak, not about descriptive language.

There's also a time and a place - using the correct register and language for the occasion and the audience is a skill, more so than wielding an idiom is.

That reminds me of "It's only <insert number> sleeps till <event>". Grrrrr.

Twice the distance from the middle to the end.

Do you need to take a pill?

I don't like when the word 'share' is used regarding a child. Like its some object. 'Golden globe winner blah blah, who shares a daughter with actress blah blah, recently wed younger woman blah blah at a small ceremony in Venice'.

The phrase originated in the US in the 19th century as “think” because think was more commonly used as a noun back then. It has since morphed to “thing” which is the more commonly used modern phrase.

Eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ve_Got_Another_Thing_Comin%27

That actually reminds me:

amazing

this is one of the adjectives that has been overused to the point of having lost any meaning.

Perhaps it's exhausted itself now as its not quite as ubiquitous as it was, but at one point every other thread was about a man who was an "amazing dad" - apart from being drunk all the time, unemployed, not doing any domestic work or childcare, constantly insulting his children's mother and not remembering his children's names, let alone their birthdays or ages...

Re the “warming the cockles of your heart’ — it’s been around since the 17thc, and there seem to be two main explanations, one, the resemblance of the human heart to a cockle (from the French ‘coquilles’) and a physician comparing the ventricles of the heart to shells. So literally the interior of your heart is being made to feel warm by a sensation of comfort/joy.

Perimenopause and menopause are two different stages though. Perimenopause is a transitional stage leading up to the menopause (the date when you haven't had a period for 12 months). Menopausal is what you are after reaching the menopause. So, if you're perimenopausal and want to shorten the phrase, it's more accurate to say you're peri than menopausal.

Agree on "having post partum" though. I hadn't heard that before.

A phrase I've seen on forums that I've never understood is "shit eating grin". I think it means when someone is smug about something, or happy that something bad happened to someone? It's a horrible image though!

Respectfully, all that Wiki proves is that Judas Priest also misused the phrase.

"Shit eating grin" is one of those clumsy and inapt phrases that became popular only because people like saying "shit" and combining it, disgustingly, with eating.

Thought of another. “From scratch” when referring to cooking. I get the origin of it but hearing it makes me cringe. Don’t know why 🤷‍♀️

Shit eating grin makes me literally think of my dog chancing her arm with literal shit eating on a walk, wherever she can try to get away with it 😂

Eg. It's forbidden, disgusting and rude but she pushes the boundaries anyway, with a very smug kind of deviant glee.

Wow, so many posters angry at simple colloquialisms. Some even angry at the obviously joke coinages that riff on existing colloquialisms. "Cheap at half the price" is a JOKE, meaning "expensive". "Spill the tea" is a lovely variation on "Spill the beans". It suggests the intimacy of a shared cuppa as the context for enjoyable gossip.

We all use colloquialisms. Lots of them are naff (e.g. from this thread title "give me the rage") but they still do a job, just as single words do.

I'm sad to read again the common MN objection to "sorry for your loss". When people try to express sympathy for something so raw as a bereavement, I don't want them to preen themselves by imagining they can come up with a form of words that actually meets the awfulness of the situation. I want them to give common and conventional signals of support that place the spotlight on the actual situation, not their self-declared emotional and linguistic skills.

But it's all symptomatic of the blandness creeping in, further evidence that lots of people can't be arsed to have curiosity about non standard phrases, and also despise the use of the vernacular. Boring. And dare I say controlling of the speech of others. We know what that can lead to.. Corporate groupthink, lack of oral cultural history and individuality, death of creativity and that woven history of shared personal expression.

Where I live, it's always time to crack out the juicy idioms, thank fuck for that. (All praise fuck)

Oh yes! My dog always wants to snuggle up and huff in my face after doing that! Literally giving me a shit eating grin 🤢