lizardsfromspace:
I don’t actually think every problematic expression has a better, longer version with the opposite meaning that oddly enough no one heard of until it surfaced on the internet like ten years ago. I think that is potentially not true
“The full expression is ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’.” Is that why we can find plenty of references to “blood is thicker than water” from the 1700s and earlier but no reference to the longer one until the 1990s then
“It’s not 'the customer is always right’, it was 'the customer is always right in matters of taste’” Is that why when you look the longer quote up you get no source, and if you look up the former you get a history of how it was coined by a department store owner in the context of taking customer complaints seriously in an era of more-or-less open fraud and retailers saying caveat emptor
We can say a phrase is useless to us now due to cultural changes without pretending there was a secret, true phrase that was always there and always in line with modern values and everyone who used the 'wrong’ phrase for centuries was an ignorant fool. Like, “the customer is always right” was rooted in a context of retailers never heeding complaints about safety or quality, we can just go “this isn’t relevant in an era where complaining customers have too much power” without making up an unattested history of it really being about letting people buy ugly hats