Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Although not a grammatical error, one mistake that always annoys me is to see the expression "whet your appetite" (ie, sharpen it) wrongly written "wet your appetite" (ie dampen it). It makes me wonder if people who write such things ever actually stop and consider the meaning of what they are saying.
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What I find interesting is when a phrase or figure of speech falls over into becoming an idiom. For you the whetting of an appetite still makes sense because you know what whetting is, so the phrase "whet you appetite" derives part of it's meaning from the meanings of the words that make it up. For others the phrase had become idiomatic - the phrase a whole has a meaning but that meaning has become detached from the "literal" meanings of the words - hence there is no way of knowing that it is whetting and not wetting. The classic example of an idiom becoming completely detached from the meanings of the words that make it up is "kick the bucket" - I know of no convincing explanation as to why this phrase might mean "to die", yet most British English speakers would know this meaning without stopping to think about the literal meanings of the words.