Timeline for Does the phrase "operate with a full deck" have the same meaning as "play with a full deck"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
4 events
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| Jan 27, 2020 at 23:43 | comment | added | Linguist Lindley | Good points. I agree that it's a malaphor (though that doesn't mean it can't become common and accepted), that Google results must be interpreted with caution (which I'm usually better at doing! whoops), and that Trump's use of the phrase inflated the number of hits for it. Where I really screwed up was not realizing HOW MUCH it inflated the number. Wow. (I just poked around in the results...) I've edited my answer accordingly. Thank you! I'm a huge COCA fan, by the way; it's just that, for rare things (the "playing" version appears only five times in COCA), I sometimes resort to Google. | |
| Jan 27, 2020 at 23:12 | history | edited | Linguist Lindley | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
corrected part of the answer based on a comment. thank you!
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| Jan 25, 2020 at 11:35 | comment | added | Jay A. Little | Be careful judging the frequency of language use simply by checking Google results because they cast a very flexible net so not all of them will match the phrase, and the fact that Trump said it will have created thousands of those hits by itself because of people repeating his exact words. The phrase cannot be found in a dictionary, nor in a corpus such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English: english-corpora.org/coca I'm willing to be wrong if you can find other times the phrase "operating with a full deck" has been used, but I believe it was a malaphor. | |
| Jan 25, 2020 at 4:59 | history | answered | Linguist Lindley | CC BY-SA 4.0 |