Along those lines, the original quote was The customer is always right in matters of taste. So if a customer want’s a drink made of prune juice and ouzo, it’s not your job to say it’s an awful combination. But it has nothing to do with allowing customers to walk all over you.
Isn’t the original saying “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” meaning the literal opposite of how its used?
E.g. “the dog that didn’t bark in the night”.
But I don’t think that’s an example of a saying that breaks or reverses the original meaning. That’s just an example of people who are stronger on slogans than on logic substituting the former for the latter.
A comparable example is people using “correlation doesn’t equal causation” as some sort of all-purpose rebuttal. Sometimes correlation results from causation and sometimes it doesn’t and it depends on the specifics, which need to be looked at more closely for possible non-causation bases for the correlation. But people use it to entirely dismiss correlation as evidence of causation, which is not logically sound.
“No love was lost between them” was first used (to my knowledge) in the original Babes in the Woods story.
Original meaning - they loved each other so much, there was none missing (lost)
Present meaning - they hate each other
I always read this as "I could care less about this but it’s not worth the effort "
But it’s probably just a mis-statement.
The Quote Investigator, who is my go-to site on these issues, doesn’t mention this variant at all.
The earliest close match located by QI and fellow researcher Barry Popik appeared in an article about the retailer Marshall Field of Chicago that was published in “The Boston Sunday Herald” and “The Boston Globe” in September 1905.
Broadly speaking, Mr. Field adheres to the theory that “the customer is always right.”
Other people have looked for someone who added “in matters of taste” and found nothing like it in the early usages, although there were many variants in the years before WWI.
My own guess is a switching of usage from plural to singular. If you were talking about a group of people, you could say that none of them could care less about XYZ.
I don’t understand what you are saying here. If the phrase is “I” could care less, then how does thinking it applies to a group of some other people help get across the point that XYZ is actually something that you could not care less about?
Another one is reference to religion as “the opium of the people”.
It is typically used today as wholly demeaning and mocking of religion but the wider context of Marx’s comment is not so dismissive.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people
in that way it is understood as something that comes out of terrible conditions and is an understandable and soothing response that helps people.
I’ve always assumed that the original wording was “As if I could care less”, and people just started dropping the “as if” part.
My own guess is a switching of usage from plural to singular. If you were talking about a group of people, you could say that none of them could care less about XYZ.
I’m saying ‘none of them could care less’ is correct usage, and people have switched it to ‘they could care less’.
Thinking about it, it’s not a switch from plural to singular, it’s a switch from negative (none of a group) to positive (all of a group).
From what I’ve heard, that ‘original’ blood-of-the-covenant version is actually a very recent invention, so I guess the people saying that one are reversing the original.
I think it might mean “I care so little about it already that even if I cared even less you wouldn’t notice the difference”.
Ah, I see what you mean, it just took me a bit to run it round my head.
I can see your suggested path from one usage to the other but consider me unconvinced. I think they are just doing it to wind me up on purpose (like my son does after I let it be known that it grinds my gears. note to self: do not honestly tell a teenage boy what winds you up)
“Greed is good” as quoted by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.
Some people infer Gordon’s original meaning in that “greed” is a positive thing in that it drives the pursuit of economic growth and expansion to meet people’s needs and wants.
Other people use the expression ironically as a cautionary tale of Gordon’s actual unethical behavior and a rebuke of the entire financial system.
I sort of read “I could care less” as shorthand for “as if I could possibly care less”.
Just lazy sarcasm, perhaps.
Another that occurred to me. Originally, Fred Hoyle coined the phrase “big bang” as a dismissive insult to the hypothesis of the early universe expansion.
Of course now it is used widely in a positive way and it has been shorn of Hoyles original intent.
In a similar vein, the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment, which is sometimes taken to be an interesting extrapolation of quantum superposition to the macroscopic world, was actually intended as ridicule of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics through a sort of reductio ad absurdum. Schrodinger was trying to show that since it’s absurd for the cat to be simultaneously both alive and dead, it was equally absurd to believe that quantum superposition exists until an observation is made, and then it collapses to a definite state.