The items I mentioned are frequently used and widely accepted in my workpace. When I’ve called them out, the response is rationalizations and justifications. i.e. “yes we can flush out issues, like flushing game birds out of a hedge.” OED may not have caught up to it yet, but history suggests that it’s only a matter of time. So unless you have a more rigorous definition of “acceptable” in mind, then these constructions certainly fit the general sense.
Fair enough - that’s the kind of stuff I mean. And I was of course joking about “flushing out” details that were cowering in a closet, but it seems your coworkers would say something similar without joking, whereas I thought they simply didn’t notice the difference between “flush” and “flesh.” Yikes!
I see you’ve worked with Harpo too:
That ship has sailed. Most dictionaries now allow it.
Are not all experiences unique?
Hmm, maybe they have a Shrodiners sandwich? 
Or maybe they mean- dont eat it unless you are hungry.
never mind
Most people don’t even register “flesh” as a verb. That’s only necessary if you’ve learned the phrase “flesh out” by reading it in print. Many people (especially younger people) haven’t, so they unconsciously replace it with a construction that seems more sensible. Pretty soon everyone’s saying “flush out” instead of “flesh out”, and if challenged about it, they can produce a reasonable (if historically ungrounded) justification. So that’s the new construction.
I had a similar argument with someone over “defuse” vs. “diffuse” (as in, de-risk a risky situation). They were so insistent that a situation could be “diffused” like an offensive odor that I realized the ship has already sailed. Now and forevermore, we will “diffuse” tense situations, regardless of how you or I feel about it.
A data point regarding “flushing out the details.” There are regional dialects where ‘e’ sounds and short ‘u’ sounds get interchanged, at least in some common words. Some that I’ve heard:
“Flush” for “flesh”
“Trussle” for “trestle”
“Rebber” for “rubber”
“Tetch” for “touch.”
Might be some others, but those are ones I’ve heard personally–and obviously. Southeastern US.
For sure in this era of national (worldwide really) communications by sound and vid recording, folks’ whose regional dialect swaps sounds of vowels in a systematic way versus the “standard” high register speech is a made to order scenario for causing these kinds of flesh/flush changes.
IOW as a completely made up example…
If you Mr. Northerner didn’t mean “flush out as in quail from a bush”, why did you pronounce the word “flesh” as in “meat” with exactly the vowel sound Southerners like me I use for flushing out quail?
I fear English (or at least US English) has recently passed its peak of spelling standardization. Also its peak level of agreement on word meaning, and especially of word choice within idioms like we’re now discussing.
From here on out it only gets woolier. And that’s before we add in the vast amount of “interesting” English being spoken in e.g. India and China that is increasingly exerting influence on usage.
This process is no doubt sped along when there is a vaguely credible relationship between the wrong word and the desired meaning. Like you, I’d rather defuse a situation than make it diffuse, but I suppose if you could do the latter, it would likely accomplish the former.
“Mute” and “moot” have the same problem. Even though I know it’s wrong (or was - I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it is becoming acceptable due to the way people talk), I can easily see how someone might think a “mute point” makes sense.
Or saying “tow the line” instead of toe. We once had a long thread where the tow proponents insisted that the phrase was somehow nautical in origin.
Yeah, well, screw that ship and those dictionaries and the horse they rode in on. @We_re_wolves_not_werewolves is perfectly right to be annoyed. I am too.
An even constanter annoyance is the use of “beg the question” to mean “raise the question.”
How often does one find themselves needing to use the rhetorical definition of “beg the question” vs the common one? I’ll tell you: for me, I’ve never had to use “beg the question” in its original meaning, but maybe I don’t hang around enough philosophers or logicians. Plus it’s plainly obvious what sense of the phrase is being used. Personally I just don’t use it at all, as most people don’t know what it originally meant, and to avoid annoying the obnoxious pedants, I say “raise the question” when I want to use the more common meaning of “beg the question.” (Even Merriam-Webster lists this as the primary meaning.)
You’re right: no one ever assumes the truth of what they’re trying to prove or argue for. /s
If you’re familiar with the term, that makes it easier to spot the thing the term refers to.
shrug. I am quite familiar with the term from university and beyond. I just don’t ever find a need to use it in its original sense.
That reminds me of a joke:
A computer programmer is asked by his wife to to pick up a gallon of milk from the store, and if they have eggs get a dozen. I little while later the programmer returns from the store with 12 gallons of milk.
“Why in the world did you get 12 gallons of milk?”, the wife asks.
“Because they had eggs.”
Not to mention that the rhetorical definition is based on a questionable translation from the Latin - which is itself a questionable translation from the original Greek.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290
(tl:dr: rhetoricians would save us all a lot of arguing if they’d just call the fallacy “assuming the conclusion.”)
Yeah, to me the proper use of it in a colloquial situation acts more like a quasi-intellectual shibboleth than anything else.
Using “cliché” as an adjective, as in “That is so cliché.” Cliché is a noun, people, as in “That is such a cliché.” It’s been misused for so long and so often, that is has itself become a cliché.
Especially when all you have to do is add a ‘d’ and it becomes an adjective.
Spelling standardization is over-rated. Shakespeare got along fine without it.