A poster mentions irrational annoyance caused by idiom-mangling – by all sane view-taking, disproportionate to the offence, but you just can’t help it. I suffered this, from some things habitually said by my ex. One involved the saying about someone being “a piece of work” – sometimes with an adjective added: “nasty piece of work”, etc. My ex always put it as “piece of works” – which to my mind doesn’t make sense; whereas the singular version, does.
This exasperated me: but I always felt that I had to suffer in silence. She was decidedly thin-skinned; and about a lot of things, highly oblivious – correcting her would just have occasioned hurt feelings, and no change for the better.
“Steely Dan is not one person. We get fringe benefits, not French benefits, it’s not the Leaning Tower of Pizza, and James Dean was an actor—Jimmy Dean makes sausages.”
Good alternative, for sure. But in this case I believe he was using a word sound-alike to mean something it didn’t mean. It was comical at least. Along the lines of other misfires in this thread.
I always tried to avoid rolling my eyes when somebody wanted me to draw up a graft of some trend in our business.
Basically, I concur re either / or: think it originated as, “hear the excellent stuff which this person is saying” – but probably, almost from the first, also with overtones of “we, over here, agree”. Homophones can be handy things !
Apparently, you have never tried my Jim Beam pudding recipe. You don’t have to taste it to know the proof is there, smelling will do the trick! A match will work as well…