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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
From a comments section on WashingtonPost.com
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor … 53e2a3c426
”
Karen Jonsson
9:34 PM EDT
Police more and more are afraid of their shadows! Why are they hiring people who are so scared? I would never become one for that very reason. I am holy unqualified and so are these trigger happy police officers. They want to have a dangerous job but are scared of danger. They have to truly screen these people!! .....
In this construction, “wholly” is simply an intensifier—but so is “holy”!
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It is noteworthy how the holy and its opposites are called into service as swear-words, expletives and intensifiers. The confluence of the eschatological and the scatological, as someone put it. E.g. damned and f-’in could be used in place of holy in the phrase above, given the right context.
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That doesn’t keep me from suspecting that the quoted usage is mostly a spelling mistake, or at most one that fails to discern any particular semantic contribution from holy , particularly any suggestion of sanctity, to the phrase.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2017-07-23 23:20:29)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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There was mention of the Wholly Roman Empire
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=344
and I think that this is a more promising angle. I am fairly sure that some of the ghits for ‘wholly matrimony’ are not puns:
Telugu marriage is sanctified with seven pledges that the bride and groom make to each other that binds them in wholly matrimony.
I am a conservative Christian, who does not believe in pre-marital sex. God created sex as a bond shared between a man and a woman in wholly matrimony.
and in amongst other puns there’s:
Me and a friend are fighting. He thinks the phrase holy shit is spelled wholly shit, I say its holy shit. What does Reddit think.
Though along the lines of the OP I’m sure some people think the expression is ‘Wholly Smoke’ but how to prove it without a confession?
Perhaps we need a team of travelling inquisitors.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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