Speaking of idiomatic English and its quirks, I have a playful website-in-progress to illustrate English phrasal verbs, such as…
“If I can’t keep up, the company could lay me off”
“I can’t get over how you just… took off! Why?”
“I held out as long as I could, but eventually gave in”
"I came to when the drug wore off.”
I’ve been accumulating snippets of lyrics that illustrate the use of these expressions, like
My favorite idiomatic English work is “The Chaos”, a poem by Dutch writer Gerard_Nolst_Trenite, which begins:
A close second for odd English usage is “Gadsby: a story of over 50,000 words without using the letter E”, a 1939 lipogrammatic, novel by Ernest Vincent Wright, which begins with this absurdly tortuous paragraph:
enjoy,
-e
Who was it that decided that…
(“not wrong” or “not left”) + “not at home” = “now” or “immediately”
at on in over :: AT noon, ON Saturday, IN December, OVER Christmas
up and down :: Speed up, Slow down, Slow up???
And speaking of slowing down, while I was driving, my wife once accused me of “slowing down too fast.” 
The thing about language is “Some have fun with it, others use the sum of it”.
And the title is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Any other frequently misquoted titles you know of? Here’s one:
On the Origin of Species
– the “On” is rarely quoted.
<ramble>
In addition, neither the book in its original text or, therefore, the author himself coined the phrase survival of the fittest. That praise should go to one Herbert Spencer by way of Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin liked it so much, he included it in the fifth edition. Link.
And that phrase too has problems in today’s English. Many (most?) people think “fittest” means what you’d expect it to mean today: fit, as in exercises a lot, not a couch potato, etc. Back then, it just meant “best fit” as in “fits best into its environment and surroundings so as to survive and thrive”. Read the link, it’s sure to be mentioned.
</ramble>
So, I figured out — just from the fact that “seer” is thrown in there as an anomaly (mixing up the queer vs fair reading habit) — that ‘seer’ is surely pronounced as “sayr” in the version of English Nolst Trenité knew.
At least one online person in an online discussion confirms, "In my part of the world, you will hear “seer” pronounced like “pair”. Not sure what part of the world that is, but perhaps here we’re seeing an example of how — if a word is rare enough and found more in books than in conversation — many folks will just start pronouncing it more like it looks.
And therein lies the pitfall.
“Do” and “Due”, where I come from, can never be confused. Yet here, in America (my adopted country) I see “due” written as “do” quite often, including by those I might expect to know the difference.
The reason (I believe) my country(wo)men don’t confuse the two spellings is the pronunciation:
“do” is phonetically “doo”
“due” is phonetically “d+you”, like cue, view, pew…
In the UK, there is a science-y TV show called Horizon (been running since the sixties). During one particular episode, they were meant to be visiting some kind of lab in California somewhere. On arrival, they found the doors to the lab closed, a handwritten sign on the door saying, “Closed do to the flu outbreak”.
Really.
Yep, in my neck of the woods we’ve dropped that pattern for du. F(y)utile, but Dūbious, B(y)eauty and C(y)utie but Dūty, Comp(y)uter but Prodūcer. At least on this point, we’re actually pretty consistent!
Here: Noo York
Me: N+you York
Funny turns of phrase?
Funniest by far (for me) this century…
“No, I’m an atheist, thank God.” Christpher Hitchens (Who else)
Oops. My reoccuring mistake 
Yes, I read and understood the original, Charles Darwin is the closest thing I have to a personal hero, and a deep understanding of evolution is an interest. This rereading of fittest is extensive, but its even worse, the false conclusions drawn from it.
Ah, now we’re getting into Selfish Gene and The Ancestor’s Tale territory.
As long as you don’t misunderstand this term, I don’t think you do. As Richard Dawkins said recently, in a discussion, it is the gene that selfishly propagates itself that succeeds, but to do so, the phenotype it describes, and development, of the phenotype (us individuals), has an advantage, if it promotes the success of its relatives, and even can favor Altruism. That is individuals, in a healthy environment or community, are more likey to survive and thus reproduce “selfish genes”.
Personaly I would not use the term Darwinism, although on wikipedia the definition seems harmless, this term is often used either by its detractors or people who use it to justify ill’s.
I would be more likely to Concider the evolution of tiddlywiki by unnatural selection 
however it is certianly a bundle of memes.
Like any, large, robust, explanatory theory with plenty of empirical evidence, the “theory of evolution” certainly can be used to throw light on other complex fields like design and software, which also have similar qualities. Including research and “development”.
Perhaps a full responce, can one day, come in an essay.
Perhaps Darwinism did indeed have a role in the evolution of TiddlyWiki: I might have mentioned this before, but a formative experience for me was working on two BBC Horizon programmes with Richard Dawkins in the 1980s: Nice Guys Finish First and The Blind Watchmaker. The only copies online I can find are on Dailymotion and are linked below.
I worked quite closely with Dawkins, particularly for the second programme. He was kind and considerate to me and I enjoyed the experience very much.
Dawkins was already a well-known author, and was yet to become so broadly controversial. Nonetheless, the main impact on me was to make me see that I needed to look more widely than just science in my quest to understand the world.
For NGFF, I made a simple explanatory animation to demonstrate Dawkin’s idea that cooperation with other individuals could be an evolutionary advantage. I programmed the animation on the BBC Micro, working with a graphic designer on the design of the figures.
I also produced the end credits for the show:
For TBW, I made an implementation of Dawkin’s “biomorph” on the Commodore Amiga to illustrate evolution. Dawkins had already created the basic algorithm for drawing a pattern, I just made it slicker and added a user interface for selecting offspring and editing genes:
I also made a 3D animation of flying through a three dimensional projection of the multidimensional space containing all possible biomorphs which was also used during the opening sequence:
The crazy thing about making the animation was that the Amiga was nowhere near fast enough to render it in realtime. Instead we connected the Amiga up to an expensive videotape machine deep in BBC TV Centre, and recorded it a frame at a time, with the VT operator calling “next” and me pressing the space bar to trigger the next frame.
It is so nice to see this! The RUSTON (TiddlyWiki) deserves an personal history.
TT
