I'd air.....

[Justkeeprollingalong]

....on the side of caution. 🤦🏻‍♀️
A new one on me, just seen on a thread.

I suppose it's not in a context where it could be a pun?

Sadly not.

Airing caution sounds like they're flapping it about 😆 flapping caution around is probably a good idea depending on the scenario.

They could air on the side of caution or throw caution to the wind.

I wonder if the same people have erring cupboards?

I suspect they’ve never or rarely seen it written down and just don’t know. My latest bugbear is ‘reigned him in’ like they literally don’t even analyse what the sentence means.

May I err and stray like a lost sheep and go off on a tangent about 'reign'. You know it sometimes rains all afternoon, well there was a story, true or not, that the late Queen was offered a second glass of wine at lunch time and the late Queen Mother said, "Are you sure you should, darling? You've got to reign all afternoon." Maybe they were at the races and the words had already been used in relation to the weather forecast.

A lot of people do not read much.

One of my friends from when we were babies never reads. I hadn't thought about it but there were no books in their house when we were children.
She went to a primary school that wasn't very good, and she was in the lower streams at secondary school.

She looks immaculately dressed and groomed at all times, and does very well in a customer facing job, but doesn't have a wide vocabulary and would struggle to read something like a novel. She isn't dyslexic and doesn't seem to have a low IQ.

She said she can read but doesn't know what the words mean.

Err is quite a 'literary' word, I would say.

It would be easy to have heard it but never seen it written down.

@LauderSyme , isn't it said as 'Ur'?

I think that depends on the speaker and maybe their accent! I have heard both. I suppose 'air' is closer than 'ur' to the sound you get in 'error'.

That's funny, being Irish I'd SAY it more like 'air'. I can imagine some people who hear that and never read it would write ''I'd air on the side of caution''. To me it shows that they're pushing themselves outside of the level of English that they're really comfortable with, ie, exposed to growing up. So it's an effort to improve their vocabulary.

@LauderSyme , but error is a different word. I don't say air-uhr for error, I say ehr-uhr.
When I say erred, I say it as urd.

err
[əː]
verbformal
err (verb) · errs (third person present) · erred (past tense) · erred (past participle) · erring (present participle)