- When I'm feeling down about people misusing grammar,
I like to decorate my wine rack.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat noises)
Ok, let's be honest,
English is a tricky capricious language
full of contradictions, weird inconsistent rules
and words that are their own antonyms,
like peruse, which is often used to mean
either read thoroughly or read cursorily.
We can't even get all of our common sayings right.
In fact, we get a lot of them wrong.
(upbeat electronic music)
All intensive purposes.
This is an understandable slip, I guess,
because it sounds very close to the correct version,
all intents and purposes,
a phrase coined by King Henry VII,
in an English act of parliament.
It means, in every practical sense.
The mispronunciation has been popping up
in speech and print since at least the 1870s,
so you're not alone.
Unless you're referring to Snoop Doggs,
snoop lion, whatever,
referring to his album Doggy Style,
you probably mean dog-eat-dog.
It's a corruption of the Latin phrase
Canis canenum non est,
which states that dogs do not eat each other.
Nevertheless, dog-eat-dog is meant to convey
the vicious every-man-for-himself nature
of life and society.
To say something is tongue-in-cheek,
is to say it in an ironic, kidding or non-serious way.
Most folks think that the saying derived
from the 18th century practice
of actually one's tongue against the inside
of one's cheek after saying something
to show that it's a joke.
Like this.
Tongue-in-cheek doesn't make any sense
unless you're at a butcher's counter
or like you're a cannibal or something.
This is getting dark.
Let's move on.
Ok, this is tricky.
Is it a bald-faced lie or a bold-faced one?
Both phrases are commonly flubbed,
but they are both correct.
They just have two slightly different meanings.
A bald-faced lie or bare-faced
for our English friends,
means one that is undisguised
and clearly untrue.
A bold-faced lie, on the other hand,
or face, is one that is impudent
or disrespectful.
What Key and Peele might call churlish.
Of course, there's a Venn diagram here,
so many of these lies probably fall
under both categories.
Have you ever heard someone say,
"He made a 360 degree turn in his life"?
Unless the guy is right back where he started,
that's probably not what you mean.
Degrees aren't only a way to measure temperature
and angles, they are also cliches people
use to describe stuff.
The problem is that these terms
are regularly misused.
A complete circle is 360 degrees,
a half circle, meanwhile, is 180 degrees.
This is the phrase one might use
to describe a complete change
from one extreme to another.
A wallflower that becomes an extrovert
overnight has made a 180 degree change.
If he reverts to his shrinking violet ways,
boom, 360.
Here's an example of just how tricky English can be
when people really put their minds to it.
Literally used to be misused literally all the time.
Get it?
People would say literally when they mean figuratively
because for a long time, literally meant
that something actually happened
or was technically inarguably true.
But, people used it as a dramatic exaggeration so often,
that in September 2011,
the good folks over at the Oxford English Dictionary
gave in and added the second meaning
making literally, like peruse,
literally its own antonym.
It means the opposite of itself now.
Thanks a lot.
English speakers got it wrong
so often that we changed the meaning of the word.
Literally.
These are just a few often misunderstood sayings.
Check out our article
10 Common Sayings You're Probably Saying Wrong
for more examples and let us know
which phrases or sayings get under your skin.
Throw us a like, subscribe
and let us know what you want
to hear more about next.
(single tone)