Linguistic Amusement

A quick illustration of the fixity of clichéd expressions. H. R. Block (a tax return company) currently is running a promotion that if you don’t get the maximum possible tax return using them, the tax return is free. Here’s the slogan they use (at least on bus shelters in downtown Providence.)

Get every penny you deserve, or don’t pay a dime

I was sort of stunned to notice how much more natural that sounds, even to my foreign ears, than

Get every nickel you deserve, or don’t pay a quarter

While on this theme, a couple of Google spellchecks that don’t really help.

judgment: 8,190,000
judgement: 2,760,000

busses: 417,000
buses: 3,660,000

The last one of these amuses me every time I walk past the corner in downtown Providence where there are two signs opposite each other with a word for more than one bus, and no other word containing ‘s’, and five ‘s’s between them. (Disclaimer: At least there were such signs last I looked – they might have been replaced/repaired by now.)