My husband has been doing something useful but criminal for the past two years. He reads the sports pages, mostly of the Telegraph, or of other papers if another member of his club has nabbed the Telegraph. When he comes across something promising, he tears out a snippet, none too neatly often, and stuffs it in his top pocket. That is antisocial and deserves expulsion. But it is not for a mere woman to interfere.
I’ve gone through some of his grubby snippets that include the words to coin a phrase. Most are used in the orthodox manner, ‘ironically to introduce a cliché’ as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. Brexit allowed these words to be attached to strong and stable, take back control or nothing has changed.
But in my husband’s plunder, examples of to coin a phrase crop up in the erroneous sense of ‘borrow’ or ‘steal’.
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