"Step foot"

[MrsDoylesLastTeabag]

When did "to set foot" become "to step foot"? It grinds my gears.

Ooh that one annoys me too! I assume it's one of those phrases that people have misheard, or they use the phrase they think it should be.

Yes, this drives me up the wall- it's both the incorrectness and the redundancy that's irritating.

You don't step your foot, you step with your foot, and the whole point of a good, specific verb like "step" is that it removes the need to specify which body part you're doing it with anyway!

This drives me round the bend too.

There's so much of this sort of stuff around that I am starting to think that people are just thick.

Exactly!

Not so much thick as just never, ever, read anything. No books, no newspapers, just internet forums which are just echo chambers full of people who ALSO don't read books and therefore really, genuinely, think that phrases are what they hear them as being. They have literally never seen them written down.

I need the 😂emoji back for this sort of refreshing honesty.

That's true, but it irritates me anyway.

Oh, absolutely. I hate to see the language being tortured too.

I don’t remember hearing this one until relatively recently, perhaps about the time the 'should of' surge started. It sounds really grating. I hate it.

Agreed!

Exactly this. As I always say; if you don’t read, you can’t spell. All people are doing is mishearing and then attempting to write what they’ve misheard. Appalling

Agree.

It's very clear that many people never read beyond the level of an eight year old.

I was once told that one of the newspapers, possibly The Sun, but not definitely, aims for its language to be what suits a reading age of about 8 or 9.

@upinaballoon Grim

The person who said it was at a college, teaching an evening class about teaching very, very slow learners so I guess it was a fact rather than her private opinion.

I don't agree that it's about poor reading skills. Language is a fundamentally social phenomenon so it's natural that people absorb and repeat phrases others use in conversation- including where they know it's not quite right.

I'm the type who will very determinedly and even crisply keep saying "set foot", even when someone else has just used "step foot". But others would feel that was rude or confrontational, which I understand.

Ultimately I'm aware this means my irritation at it can't go anywhere, since I'm saying nobody is really at fault and it can't be changed! I guess I'll just pull up a seat next to King Cnut and join him in shouting at the sea....

I have only ever seen ‘step foot’ on MN so was beginning to think I had been saying it wrong all these years, so pleased to see this 😆

Set foot is imo correct.
It's along the same lines as "off your own back/bat" and "on the back of". I think it's a generational thing.
"I could/couldn't care less" is another. Younger people will have heard Americans on tv saying could care less (which makes no sense to me) but I might be wrong. It's a mindfield, as my mum would say. 🙊

'Could care less' is nonsense when it's used to mean that the speaker could not care less.

It's so careless. It doesn't take much muscle effort to say 'n't' at the end of 'could'.

It's awful. I don't even understand. Like, why is the word 'set' so difficult to accept?

'Step foot' sounds like a Victorian disease, a ballroom dance technique, or if your step dad was in 'Steptoe and Son'?!

Yes. The other one that annoys me is "upmost" instead of "utmost".

I've been rewatching Desperate Housewives and both Bree and Gabrielle have "Stepped foot" in Season 4! Is it, perhaps, yet another US import?

Julia Roberts says this in Mona Lisa Smile.

I’ve just read a novel by C L Taylor, ‘stepped foot’ is used.

I've just read several kindle unlimited books by two different authors, and "step foot" and "upmost" appear in both. Makes me wince.

My username derives from just such a (misheard) mistake on another recent thread, but it made me laugh, not wince.