#phrases — Public Fediverse posts

This is the moment of truth! :gutkato_kolereta:

After that, we can go back to lies and mystifications. :gutkato_dikfingro_supren:

#lang_en #absurd #phrases #words

40+ Common expressions that became great song titles

Listed below are 40 common expressions that have become great song titles over the years. They are presented in alphabetical order. The songs shown date from 1955 to 2026. Feel free to pass along any others that you may know.

Peace!

“Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” – 1959 song by Dean Martin

“Ain’t That a Shame” – 1955 song by Fats Domino and in 1979 by Cheap Trick

“Another One Bites the Dust” – 1980 song by Queen

“Asking for a Friend” – 2025 song by Foo Fighters

“Back of My Hand” – 2025 song by Belair Lip Bombs and 2005 song by The Rolling Stones

“Beating Around the Bush” – 1977 song by AC/DC

“Can We Still Be Friends” – 1978 song by Todd Rundgren

“Come As You Are” – 1991 song by Nirvana

“Cry Me a River” – 1955 song recorded by multiple artists

“Fight Fire with Fire” – song by multiple artists including Metallica

“Get On the Ball” – 1992 song by No Doubt

“God Only Knows” – 1966 song by The Beach Boys

“Good Help Is So Hard to Find” – 2014 song by DCFC

“Hanging Out to Dry” – 2026 song by Florence Road

“Hit the Road Jack” – 1960 song by Ray Charles

“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” – 1966 song by Marvin Gaye

“If It Makes You Happy” – 1996 song by Sheryl Crow

“Keep Your Hands to Yourself” – 1987 song by the Georgia Satellites

“Let It All Hang Out” – 2009 song by Weezer

“Let the Good Times Roll” – 1978 song by The Cars

“Life in the Fast Lane” – 1976 song by The Eagles

“Listen to Your Heart” – 1988 song by Roxette

“One Way or Another” – 1979 song by Blondie

“Only the Good Die Young” – 1977 song by Billy Joel

“Point of No Return” – 1977 song by Kansas

“Race Against Time” – 1987 song by U2

“Same Old Song and Dance” – 1974 song by Aerosmith

“Should’ve Known Better” – 2026 song by the Beaches

“Takes One to Know One” – 2025 song by the Beaches

“The Best Is Yet to Come” – 1959 song by Frank Sinatra and Count Basie

“The First Cut Is the Deepest” – 1967 song by Cat Stevens, Sheryl Crow, and others

“Too Close for Comfort” – 1956 song by Sammy Davis, Jr.

“Too Much Time on My Hands” – 1981 song by Styx

“You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” – 1974 song by Bachman Turner Overdrive

“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – 1969 song by The Rolling Stones

“You Only Live Once” – 2006 song by The Strokes

“What Can I Say” – 2005 song by Brandi Carlile

“What Do I Know” – 2025 song by Deep Sea Diver

“Wish You Were Here” – 1975 song by Pink Floyd

“Working for the Weekend” – 1981 by Loverboy

“Wrapped Around Your Finger” – 1983 song by The Police

SOURCES:

• personal knowledge
• reddit.com
• http://www.google.com
• en.wikipedia.org

Fun to see the Irish idiom "make a hames of" in a national news headline: https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0417/1568809-odonovan-protests/

I wrote about the expression in 2012: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/making-a-hames-of-it/

#language #IrishEnglish #dialect #idioms #phrases #words #blogpost

Saw this sentence with both the Irish English "give out" and a standardized-English "give out":

"The banks often give out¹ that the rules are too tight and they can’t give out² the money people need."

¹ complain
² issue, distribute

Source and commentary: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/giving-out-irish-style/

#language #dialect #idioms #IrishEnglish #EnglishUsage #phrases

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

And . . . Do Those Sheep Hallucinate Bullshit?

(AI Detective FAILS for Your Consideration)

Who is running this Artificial Intelligence? This Fatuous Forensic Criminology? This Whole Worldwide Factoid News Media?

May God Allied Mastercomputer help us!

I don’t want to hear any of the crap from the tech apologists who are going to cry, “Oh, that’s not AI; that’s just glorified autocomplete!”

Your problem, not mine.

If it’s calling itself “AI” or the humans who designed it have labeled it, “AI” – as you can clearly witness from the screen captures – then I judge it as AI.

So . . .

FAIL!

. . . Next!

. . . Another killer on the loose . . .

Australian Shepherd shows incredible smarts using 'talk buttons' to warn family of disaster

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/dog-talking-buttons-ex1

" #ICE nodding to #FarRightExtremists in recruitment posts, experts say "

[using #codes #phrases #memes songs & pictures popular among #farright and #neonazi groups in their ads to attract people to ICE.

Who could possibly have foreseen this?]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/ice-recruiting-9.7058294
1/2

Another freaking f-word

I never fully adopted freaking as an intensifier, euphemistic for fucking, partly because I swear fairly freely, and maybe also because fecking was available in my Irish English dialect. But I like having freaking available, and with its hundredth birthday round the corner, it’s a good time to showcase it.1

Freaking substitutes for its ruder cousin in all sorts of lexical and syntactic contexts, modifying adjectives (that was freaking amazing), verbs (let’s freaking go), and nouns (how is it still freaking January?), among other word classes; it’s also used as an infix (un-freaking-real) and in set phrases like freakin’ A – euphemistic, obviously, for fucking A.

Origins and use

The earliest known use of this freaking – the first citation in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, and the OED – is in the 1928 novel Georgie May, where author Maxwell Bodenheim uses two freakings and a freakin’, including:

“Gawd, ah hate the hull, freaking pack uh you,” she cried, between her sobbing.

The next example those dictionaries list is in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949):

“You point that freakin’ finger at me ’n you’re one dead pointer.”

That 21-year gap doesn’t mean no one was using it in the meantime. I found the line “You freaking fool!” in the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, available on YouTube and the Internet Archive at around the 47m 40s mark:

Films and TV, with their heightened emotions and industrious regulators, are a natural home for this expressive but family-friendly expletive. A chart from COCA shows its use concentrated in those media, occurring at over four times the rate in fiction generally and over six times the rate in speech:2

As Wiktionary notes, “Freaking (or fricking) is often used in motion pictures as a substitute for fucking so that characters can be shown to swear without the motion picture incurring censorship or a higher certificate than it otherwise might.”

Less discerningly, the Encyclopædia Britannica says freaking is “used to make an angry statement more forceful”. That’s not wrong, but it’s misleadingly narrow: freaking can amplify all sorts of emotions, even joy – ask Ned Flanders.

WikiHow knows this. An article by Wits End Parenting and Elaine Heredia says you can use freaking “to emphasize how great something or someone is” and that it “can be a positive or negative word based on context”. It adds that the word “isn’t a sin to say”, in case you were wondering.

Data

Freaking is on the rise but has been levelling off, according to data in COCA and Google’s Ngram Viewer. Rows under the dates below show frequency (i.e., number of uses), number of million words in the sample, and (hence, by division) per-million figures for direct comparison:

That levelling off is despite global use. Geographically, freaking is most popular not in the US but in Singapore, per the GloWbE corpus (freakin has the same top two, reversed). Malaysia comes in third, followed by Canada, Australia, and the Philippines:

Jack Grieve’s eye-catching swear maps of the USA, meanwhile, allow us to zoom in on what States are especially partial to freaking and freakin. Californians’ relative coolness towards them came as a surprise:

Browsing the word’s collocates (freaking/freakin’ ___) in COCA shows the company it keeps. High-ranking +1s include the adjectives awesome, amazing, hilarious, crazy, cool, hot, stupid, hard, and huge; nouns like idiot, mind, thing, break, genius, clue, and deal; and occasional verbs, like love, hate, kidding, and kill.

Some of these invite us to extrapolate the full phrases, or chunks: big freaking deal; give me a freakin’ break; not have a freaking clue; out of my/your/etc. freaking mind; Are you freakin’ kidding?

Other language corpora, such as the 14-billion-word iWeb, show a similar pattern of collocations:

Easily topping the +1s are the preposition out and the pronoun me: a sign of how well freaking [me] out caught on as an idiom, with multiple senses, after being coined in the 1960s. That’s a different usage, of course: not the intensifier freaking but the verb freak (or rather the verb phrase freak out) in the present progressive tense.

Pragmatics

Zappa fits right in here: freaking offers outsider energy for any self-defined freak (or geek) who cares to use it.3 The word’s gently countercultural flavour is also apparent in dictionary citations, where Tom Wolfe’s name recurs.

What makes freaking effective as a minced oath, and attractive to mild and novice swearers, is that it offers proximity to (and thus evocation of) strong swearing while remaining relatively benign. We see this niche exploited expertly by a child in the vampire comic 30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow:

A little later the boy defaults to freakin’, this time automatically obeying his father’s no-swearing rule, and making the word more casual by dropping the g:

Freaking is not always a straightforward substitute for fucking, however. The particular way that it lands caused slight consternation for slang expert Michael Adams when his son started using it at the age of seven:

. . . he’s not just saying That’s freakin’ cool or No freakin’ way. No, he’s saying things like What the freak?! which is a long way from Oh, my gosh on the euphemism scale. There’s the underlying profanity. There’s the phonetics. There’s the fact — apparently — that What the hell? and What the freak? — while parallel — signify differently.4

Films redubbed for TV broadcast have mixed fortunes with it, as my post “Freak those monkey-fightin’ melon farmers!” shows. “I don’t need full freakin’ forensics” in Die Hard 2 (1990) is passable, if implausible in a police station, while “Freak you!” in Casino (1995) is comically underpowered.

In his 2016 book In Praise of Profanity (which I reviewed here and recommend), Michael Adams discusses how the vowels, consonants, and pragmatics of various “partial euphemisms” for fuck – feck, frak, frick, frig, and their freaky fraternity – do their work:

. . . although people usually think euphemisms work because they substitute for profanity, in fact many euphemisms are themselves partially profane, because they more or less cover up profanities—usually less—that are still inscribed in the situations of their use, and our minds’ eyes see through them to the profanities . . . . what makes profanity and the relevant euphemisms pragmatically powerful and interesting is that the euphemisms are often both euphemisms and profanity, a fact not unknown in linguistic circles but too often overlooked when we calculate the logic of language attitudes.

We’re advocates of strong language here at Strong Language, but we know it’s not suitable for all occasions: sometimes a softball is called for. And among the many euphemisms for fucking, freaking has, in a century or so of use, established itself as a truly effective and useful option. It may be mild, but it’s got freakin’ game.

*

1 The OED also lists an obsolete, mid-17thC sense of freaking (adj.): “Of a person: inclined to change his or her mind, mood, or behaviour suddenly and unaccountably; given to freakish ideas; capricious, fickle, whimsical.” One of its fans was Samuel freakin’ Pepys: “He told me what a mad freaking fellow Sir Ellis Layton hath been” (Diary, 25 January, 1665).

2 I was unable to separate the verb freaking from the intensifier using part-of-speech tags in COCA, GloWbE, and iWeb, so these uses are combined in the graphs. To fortify the data somewhat I checked 300 examples in each corpus and found that, in COCA, 76% were the intensifier and 24% were the verb (freaking out, or plain freaking with the same sense); in GloWbE it was 74% and 26%, and in iWeb 68% and 32%. So you can consider the graphs broadly indicative but with that significant caveat.

3 We still don’t know where freak came from: origin unknown, the dictionaries say, though the OED offers speculation. Skeat says freak in the sense “whim” is of Germanic origin, being frec “bold, rash” in Old English.

4 Adams has also analyzed the use of freaking in the TV series 13 Reasons Why, tracing a character’s graduation from euphemistic to full-bore profanity.

#censorship #comics #corpusLinguistics #euphemisms #expletiveInfixation #freakOut #freaking #fuck #fucking #infixation #intensifiers #mincedOaths #phrases #popCulture #slang #swearing

@timberwraith
@Dgun8

Often language has similar words or similar sounding words that people speak with incorrectly without really knowing or realizing it's misleading or not quite right.

There is a more specific words and less misleading versions of #words or #phrases...

➡️ For example "Common sense"
...might mean "Common principles"

"Sense" is similar to "principles" but importantly principles can be more specific or measured way of saying / doing things so a list everyone can see is more agreeable, rather than your own version of "sense" which might be differently measured than list of "principles".

Since EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT and naturally they have different personality, it's better to measure it a bit more clearly which a list of principles in the middle which can help indicate agreement or debate things with less #ambiguity.

➡️ Another example
(quick-fast / maybe not perfect)

💜 Love for others is perhaps top of the #list of #commandments for Jesus ✝️ and his principles - so clears up a lot of confusion between #Christian people or #Christianity or #Religion #debate - presenting a |Yes| or |No| simple question

We all need need to debate what loving people or looking after them means perhaps after that, but can assume better and not guess too not far off than even more general / unspecific words.

So if #love is top 5 on your list then a debate "Common sense" or "Common principles" about Jesus or something can be quickly agreed / answered rather than something #ambiguous.

#Lists are always good.

#CommonSense #List of #Principles
= #Answer for #Ambiguous #words or #phrases in #Debate

@timberwraith
@Dgun8

Often language has similar words or similar sounding words that people speak with incorrectly without really knowing or realizing it's misleading or not quite right.

There is a more specific words and less misleading versions of #words or #phrases...

➡️ For example "Common sense"
...might mean "Common principles"

"Sense" is similar to "principles" but importantly principles can be more specific or measured way of saying / doing things so a list everyone can see is more agreeable, rather than your own version of "sense" which might be differently measured than list of "principles".

Since EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT and naturally they have different personality, it's better to measure it a bit more clearly which a list of principles in the middle which can help indicate agreement or debate things with less #ambiguity.

➡️ Another example
(quick-fast / maybe not perfect)

💜 Love for others is perhaps top of the #list of #commandments for Jesus ✝️ and his principles - so clears up a lot of confusion between #Christian people or #Christianity or #Religion #debate - presenting a |Yes| or |No| simple question

We all need need to debate what loving people or looking after them means perhaps after that, but can assume better and not guess too not far off than even more general / unspecific words.

So if #love is top 5 on your list then a debate "Common sense" or "Common principles" about Jesus or something can be quickly agreed / answered rather than something #ambiguous.

#Lists are always good.

#CommonSense #List of #Principles
= #Answer for #Ambiguous #words or #phrases in #Debate

Fun example of semantic drift, but is it restricted to one person? Let me know if you've encountered this reading of "take it offline", from Gen Z or elsewhere
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/amandabrummitt_i-spend-a-lot-of-time-talking-about-communication-activity-7402116821522567168-T5vD

#language #idioms #phrases #jargon #EnglishUsage

Quiz. Qui a prononcé ces phrases célèbres ?

Vendredi 14 novembre 2025 20:00 … 1 Winston Churchill. © Photo : Wikimédia / Yousuf Karsh/Library Archives/domaine public « Impossible…
#Toulon #FR #France #Actu #News #Europe #EU #actu #Actualités #célèbres #europe #phrases #prononce #Provence-Alpes-Côted'Azur #Quiz #Républiquefrançaise #toulon
https://www.europesays.com/fr/534478/

https://www.europesays.com/fr/534478/ Quiz. Qui a prononcé ces phrases célèbres ? #actu #Actualités #célèbres #EU #europe #FR #France #News #phrases #prononce #ProvenceAlpesCôteD'Azur #Quiz #RépubliqueFrançaise #toulon

Why Do We Say #OverMyDeadBody?

https://www.mentalfloss.com/language/over-my-dead-body-meaning-origins

#phrases #communcation #trivia

11 #Phrases Deeply #Unhappy People Use On A Regular Basis

https://www.oldest.org/people/phrases-deeply-unhappy-people-use/

Les #bonobos sont capables de #phrases #complexes presque comme les #humains

https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/les-bonobos-sont-capables-de-phrases-complexes-presque-comme-les-humains_229535

Les #bonobos sont capables de #phrases #complexes presque comme les #humains

https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/les-bonobos-sont-capables-de-phrases-complexes-presque-comme-les-humains_229535

Les #bonobos sont capables de #phrases #complexes presque comme les #humains

https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/les-bonobos-sont-capables-de-phrases-complexes-presque-comme-les-humains_229535

Les #bonobos sont capables de #phrases #complexes presque comme les #humains www.courrierinternational.com/article/les-...

Les bonobos sont capables de p...

"Nothing to #Sneeze At"

https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/phrases/nothing-to-sneeze-at-2

In the 17th century, #sneezing was considered a symbol of status as people believed it #clearedtheirhead and stimulated their #brain. Soon sneezing at will became a way to show one's #disapproval, #lackofinterest and #boredom.

#trivia #words #phrases #didyouknow

The Strunk cost fallacy

Myths have serious sticking power. This is true not just of the myths of antiquity but also of more modern and niche types, like the myths of English usage. It seems that nothing will ever stop people peeving pointlessly about split infinitives, double negatives, passive voice, singular they, &c.

One thing that makes usage myths sticky, and spready, is that when we’ve gone to the trouble of learning something, we’re often reluctant to unlearn it, even in the face of contradictory truth – especially when that knowledge gives us a pleasurable feeling of authority or expertise. Renouncing it means accepting that we’ve wasted our time, so instead we double down.

This makes it a form of sunk cost fallacy or sunk cost effect. The term is from economics but has spread to more general use. I’m about to spread it further, with a goofy twist: Doubling down on a bogus rule of language use because you’ve invested time or cognitive effort into learning it is hereby known as the Strunk cost fallacy (or Strunk cost effect).

Regrettably, there is no way to include E. B. White in the coinage without spoiling the pun, but both he and William Strunk Jr. bear some responsibility for promulgating a range of egregious misunderstandings about English grammar, usage, and ‘correctness’.

The dogmatic tone in those authors’ influential Elements of Style also fuels, among some of its devotees, intolerance of non-standardized dialects and informal varieties of English, because readers gain (or strengthen) the impression that in language use there can be only one right way. This is another fallacy, an insidious and socially toxic one.

If you find evidence that you have a mistaken belief about language use – it happens to us all – then my advice is to heed that evidence. Instead of allowing your defences to reject the possibility that you’ve wasted your time learning and maybe promoting a falsity, embrace the opportunity to revise your beliefs. Don’t fall for the Strunk cost fallacy.

In closing, here’s a related piece of snark:

Accidentally typed “Strunk and Why” and this sums up my feelings better than any tired rant I might muster

— Stan Carey (@stancarey.bsky.social) Oct 16, 2024 at 20:33

(I tried embedding an equivalent Mastodon post, but it didn’t work the way Bluesky’s did. I’m using both platforms for now.)

* * *

A few other coinages you might like: Whom’s Law of Hypercorrection; Indo-European Jones; scary quotes; the apostrophantom; the Typographic Oath for editors.

#books #EBWhite #grammar #humour #language #neologisms #peevology #phrases #prescriptivism #TheElementsOfStyle #usage #WilliamStrunkJr

#top10 #Common #Phrases (Almost) Everyone Gets #Wrong

If #mistaken #words are used often enough, people start to repeat and transmit them in different forms. Here are some of the most common #idioms that people #mishear and #misunderstand.

https://wordsmarts.com/wrong-idioms/

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#awkward #humor #therapy #surprise #podcast #phrases #hallo #minkorrekt #comedy #hamburg #cosmic040

9 #Phrases To #Replace #Asking '#HowAreYou?' When #Greeting #Someone, According to #Psychologists.

Instead of giving that #automatic #greeting, here's how to be more #intentional.

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Greetings

https://parade.com/living/phrases-to-use-instead-of-asking-how-are-you-according-to-psychologists

#Dictionary.com adds eight new #LGBTQ+ #words & a big #gender-#inclusive #change.

To make the #website more #inclusive, Dictionary.com also removed #binary-#gendered #phrases through its pages, replacing “#him or #her” with “#their” and “#he or #she” with “#they.”

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Language #Progress
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/09/dictionary-com-adds-nine-new-lgbtq-words-a-big-gender-inclusive-change/

‘#Polysexual’ and ‘#amalgagender’ are among #Dictionary.com’s newest words

The #online #dictionary added over 500 #words and #phrases this year, including several relating to #LGBTQ #identity and #relationships.

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Language #Inclusion #Progress #Representation #Culture

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/polysexual-amalgagender-are-dictionarycoms-newest-words-rcna103523

#Left vs. #right
#idioms #phrases #mnemonics

Creator (Composition): Leonardo Gutiérrez Cruz Filmografía: Message in a bottle. 1999
Kevin Costner & Robin Wright Penn

Título: Amar con el alma.

#alma #almasgemelas #amaconelalma #amor #amorgenuino #amorincondicional #amorinfinito #amorparadar #amorparasiempre #amorporsiempre #amorreal #amorverdadero #GiftofGod #inlove #loveislove #loveinfinity #loveforever #lovepoems #lovereal #phrases #regalodeDios #RealLove #soul #soulgrowth #soulmate #vibes #vibratehigher #vibrationofLove

Anybody ever heard/used the phrase "smile like a cheeseburger"? If yes, define please!

#words
#idioms
#phrases
#similes
#language
#WordNerds

Anybody ever heard/used the phrase "smile like a cheeseburger"? If yes, define please!

#words
#idioms
#phrases
#similes
#language
#WordNerds

Anybody ever heard/used the phrase "smile like a cheeseburger"? If yes, define please!

#words
#idioms
#phrases
#similes
#language
#WordNerds

Anybody ever heard/used the phrase "smile like a cheeseburger"? If yes, define please!

#words
#idioms
#phrases
#similes
#language
#WordNerds

Anybody ever heard/used the phrase "smile like a cheeseburger"? If yes, define please!

#words
#idioms
#phrases
#similes
#language
#WordNerds