‘Tother day I encountered one of those click-baity listicle1-thingies covering “Expressions [that] people often get wrong”. Most of them were fairly run-of-the-mill, like “for all intensive [intents and] purposes”, or “peaked [piqued] my interest”, but they occasionally veered into the prescriptivist, like the perennial complaint about the word “literally”.
What I found interesting, though, was that a lot of the “corrections” were due to the same problem. I’ve seen people express the idea that one shouldn’t mock someone for mispronouncing a word or phrase; it’s usually because they’ve read it and don’t know how it should be pronounced. But I haven’t seen the same leniency towards the opposite: people mis-using a phrase (like the first two examples above) because they’ve heard it, but never seen it written. And sometimes, it doesn’t even need correcting: depending on how the phrase is changed, it may still work just as well (like the peaked/piqued example).
Other times, though, there is a mistake (people often mix up “loose” and “lose”, for example), which it can be worth correcting, but never mocking2. The webcomic “xkcd” presents a good example of how to approach discovering that someone doesn’t know something (see below); it’s an opportunity to teach them something. And who knows? Maybe you’ll learn something too along the way.
1 Pronounced like “Sophocles”, because it’s funnier that way.
2 Your shining wit may provide immediate enjoyment, but it’s also a good way to ensure that person is less likely to talk to you in future. If the mistake provides too much humour to pass up, be clear that it’s the situation that you are laughing at (for example the unintended meaning of a mistaken phrase) and not the person — make sure they can appreciate the humour, too.
Thought Attempts 