I don't think he was wrong. Ridiculously anal about something inconsequential, yes, but that seems like an essential requirement for making it as a comedian, especially when one's shtick is an incredible- and not entirely fictional- neurosis.
But let's face it, language is filled with these oddities that don't make sense when you think them through, and the only way we make sense of it is through the clumsy and inadvisable process of adding yet more meanings to perfectly straightforward words, and this becomes most prominent when you start learning a foreign language, marvel at the literal translations of common phrases, and then turn that scrutiny upon the English equivalents. When broken down into their components, language (or at least those we dare to understand) fundamentally doesn't make a whole lot of sense, which is odd when you consider the perfectly reasonable assumption that the one quality that a language should have is to make sense.
There are plenty of phrases far more bizarre than those we're worrying about here, yet we do not mention, I suspect, for the sole reason that there are not variations of that phrase between our two similar yet opposing cultures. Therefore I propose a compromise: where such variations exist, we recognise that one is objectively more sensible than the other in some quality (such as the spirit of the metaphor or the literal meaning), if either indeed is. This does not oblige anyone to use one over the other, but I do get to (quite rightly) comment that one is particularly more ridiculous than the other, and you get to (quite rightly) call me a punctilious prick for doing so. Deal?
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