also, while we're on the subject

[fox]

Let's say you want to accomplish a task that most people would normally believe requires going to a particular location. Getting a rockin' hairdo, for example, might necessitate going to a salon. Collecting the mail might be impossible without going outside, if that's where your mailbox is.

If you manage to accomplish this task without going to the presumably-required place, you have done so "without stepping [wherever]" or "without setting foot [wherever]". Please, please, PLEASE stop saying you've done things "without *stepping foot [wherever]" RIGHT THIS MINUTE.

Thank you.

Comments

[liviapenn]

*shrugs* A lot of common phrases *sound* weird if you think about them too hard, but that doesn't make them wrong. "Imply" and "infer" are two separate words with completely opposite meanings, and it is demonstrably incorrect to confuse them (there is a lovely bit in a Nero Wolfe novel where he burns a dictionary because it says you CAN use them interchangeably, and that was in 1962) but "step foot upon" and "set foot on," imo, are just two different ways of saying the same thing.

Actually we might be both right; now that I look, "step foot UPON" or "stepping foot upon" is much more common (and that phrasing goes back to the 1830s). But nobody says "upon" these days, so it's evolved into "stepping foot ON" which does sound a bit off.

[fox]

Yeah - outdated can be another kind of wrong. I seem to recall that Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Farmer Boy" was full of one of the kids saying something like "I'm hungry" and another saying "So be I", and that had me completely stumped, because in today's (Standard American; this is not true of all dialects) English, the unconjugated copula is simply incorrect there.

My biggest objection is to "stepping foot IN", but I don't really think it's a matter of the pronoun. I think if you're stepping, the foot is implied - we also have "laying hands on", not "grabbing hands on" or what have you. We also have "setting hands on" and "setting eyes on", for that matter. They're all analagous, and "stepping foot" feels redundant (and like a recent confusion, but as I say you've disabused me of that). I wish OED could handle phrases. Them, I'd trust to tell me which came first. :-)