When I was younger, a friend said to me—if memory serves, in response to my resolute disinclination to smoke cigarettes with him—”Your body is your temple, isn’t it?” It was the first time I’d heard the expression, and although I’ve heard it many times since, it seems no less ridiculous […]
Confused Expressions
15 posts
For reasons personal and interesting only to myself, I’ve been thinking about people who complain regularly (often with the preamble that they aren’t the type of person who likes to complain), and the very old expression about which wheel gets greased. There is truth to the phrase, of course (otherwise, […]
Very few things throw me more in a conversation than when someone says, “And of course that begs the question …” In philosophy, “begging the question” is a technical term that means you’ve made the fallacy of assuming the truth of your conclusion in your premises: i.e., of arguing from […]
“I couldn’t care less” makes a lot more sense than “I could care less” when someone wants to indicate that the subject at hand holds zero, zilch, nada interest for them, but it’s the latter expression that seems more popular. In my mind this is due to one of two […]
Of all the expressions I don’t understand, “thank goodness” is my favorite. Without any other consideration, however, I’d regard the term a step above mere noise or throat-clearing. Although the first word conveys a sense of gratitude (of course), the expression as a whole is so deprived of meaning that […]
“You can’t compare apples to oranges” is a fine and meaningful expression within certain contexts: for example, if someone says that the movie version of a book had better special effects than the book, it’d be fair to take that person to task for comparing apples to oranges. They’re comparing […]