It’s funny how people hardly know what they are saying. I read recently of diplomats going to Riyadh ‘to diffuse tensions over anti-Islamic stickers’. Did the writer mean defuse? Probably. He was trying to say ‘reduce’ tensions and just reached for the nearest dead metaphor from the shelf.
Still, it doesn’t do to be too snooty about origins of words, as I have often told my husband, who responds by becoming narrower, shriller, louder and much snootier.
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