I thought my little brother was the only person who thought the expression “for all intents and purposes” was actually “for all intensive purposes”, but it appears not.
TNH, in a post that follows on nicely from the Guardian article I linked to yesterday, has a giant list of such mistakes, in what is clearly an attempt to make my head explode. Her original short list has grown exponentially with contributions from the comments. An example:
reign in one’s enthusiasm
treat this client with kit gloves
baited breath
pealing paint
on the lamb
speak my peace
she balled her eyes out
the succession to the thrown
two sense worth
One of my personal favourite peeves would be “do to” where someone really means “due to”.
One of these that annoys me a lot because it is so plausible is “tow the line” where someone really means “toe the line“. Wikipedia actually has an entry on this one, and it’s also kind of fun to look at their list of idioms in English–many of which are on TNH’s list in some mangled form.
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