Ouch. As someone who lives with three dogs and three cats, that one hits close to home.

One of our cats thinks she is my girlfriend! When I go to bed, she immediately jumps on the bed next to me and places herself right where my hand is, so I can scratch her back and tummy.

No cat peeling here!

I love these idiom screw-ups. One of my coworkers once tried to use an English idiom and it came out, "let's not beat a horse to death."

The worst offenders are ones that can be solved logically if the person spent 5 seconds to think.

"I could care less" vs "I could not care less"

The amount of people who defend the former with their own head-canon is frightening. Ones I have heard are "It's sarcastic" and "I care so little that I won't put the extra effort into caring less"

Steven Pinker and other linguists would like a word with you:

https://www.google.com/search?q=steven+pinker+i+could+care+l...

From Pinker's book The Language Instinct (p.377 or 389 depending on the edition):

> A tin ear for prosody (stress and intonation) and an obliviousness to the principles of discourse and rhetoric are important tools for the language maven. Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today's youth: the expression I could care less. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying I couldn't care less. If they could care less than they do, that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say. But if these dudes would stop ragging on teenagers and scope out the construction, they would see that their argument is bogus. Listen to how the two versions are pronounced:

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  ------------------------
  
     COULDN'T care
                    LE
                      ESS.
  i
  
  ------------------------
  
  I
            CARE
                  LE
                    ESS.
     could
  
  ------------------------

> The melodies and stresses are completely different, and for a good reason. The second version is not illogical, it's sarcastic. The point of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately implies its opposite. A good paraphrase is, “Oh yeah, as if there was something in the world that I care less about.”

But I hear you and sympathize with your point of view. I have been there myself. It didn't make sense to me that people would use a word or phrase in any meaning other than its literal one.

Especially a word like "literally", right?

Merriam-Webster has a article on that. It's literally the best article ever written!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...