Showing posts with label cliche. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cliche. Show all posts

I'm not being funny, but...

Of course, I can't exactly remember the conversation that inspired this post. But as we were leaving a café, Better Half said  I'm not being funny, but Costa's coffee has really gone downhill.† And I thought: that's the British idiom I'm going to cover next, because there is just so much Britishness...
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at this time

For completely unrelated reasons, I just checked whether I had any unpublished drafts in my blogger account and found this one from 364 days ago, which is oddly similar yesterday's topic. That was about at the time, but this one is about at this time. It started:Reader (though he might not be a reader...
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a [adjective] ask

It's been claimed that coincidences are the product of heightened attention to a particular thing or experience, and heightened attention is probably to blame for most word-coincidences. For instance, one day when I was (BrE) at university/(AmE) in college, I received a letter from my Irish (AmE)...
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could (not) care less, adverbs

A flock of relatives came from Indiana for Dad's birthday party and were underwhelmed by the hotel services in Hometown. At various times, at least three relatives told the sad story of the check-in and said that the staff "could care less if they got any business." This set off the prescriptivist...
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british overstatement

The British are masters and mistresses of understatement, one is told. Yeah, well, maybe. For your consideration, my current list of most hated, painfully overused words: essential fanatical excellence I've grumped about excellence once before, and I'm sure that it's come in from US corporate-speak....
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The book!

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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)