Disclaimer: I'm a senior citizen. (That's a euphemism for "olde pharte.") For just about all of my nearly 80 years on this flying ball of mud we call Earth, I have seen and heard the expression "set foot in ___ ." It seems that starting perhaps a year ago I have been encountering more and more instances of "step foot in ___" rather than the familiar "set foot in ___" that I have always known. Is this a regional dialect difference, is it a shift in our language, ... or is it another case of people using a phrase they thought they heard but don't really grok (like "Walla!" instead of "Voila!" or "Tow the line" rather than "Toe the line")?
Methinks 'tis an eggcorn. I'm seeing more and more, especially in things like YouTube video titles. For whatever reason in the internet age illiteracy seems to draw a lot of attention that correct grammar wouldn't, I think often because people are annoyed. As advertisers have proven again and again, there's no such thing as bad press, and as far as pure attention-whoring goes, infamous is probably far better than famous. So misspellings, the wrong word in a phrase, etc are apparently effective ways to bring in eyeballs. As a result I think a lot of people who get most of their reading from text messages, YouTube headlines, tweets etc just don't know they've been miseducated. And apparently schools are being deliberately 'loose' with English and grammar etc in this post-literate age. But, just as when people deliberately say "Whoah... DUDE!" in playful imitation of Keanu, or "Oh, gag me with a SPOOOOOON!" making fun of valley girls, it often becomes a habit and effectively a normalized part of speech for them. So, is it playful, is it a mistake, is the language changing? Yes.
It's probably language evolution, partly due to decreasing literacy (traditional reading and writing) due to digital communication. 'Step foot in' has been in the English language for while, but has exploded in the internet age: But that doesn't really tell the whole story. Compare it to 'set foot in', the more common phrasing: And you see 'Set foot in' still dwarfs 'step foot in', but ngram viewer is just for printed works, not blogs or comment sections, or spoken word.
I've never heard "step foot in__" (or maybe just never notice?) I'm inclined to say regional, as in, its blowing up in places where its "hot" and "trendy" and here in the midwest (at least, MY part of the midwest....) its not. But then again, I thought I'd out ran "conversate".... but it has cropped up as the new and trendy thing to say here.
"Conversate"? As in, to hold a conversation, to converse? What's next? Will the verb for meeting someone for lunch become "lunchate"?
The "verb" that makes me nuts is "enthuse," as in "she enthused about her new thesaurus." All teachers have their own set of prejudices, and I was careful to set mine out at the beginning of each semester. People were not allowed to enthuse (at least on paper) in my writing classes, and they were strongly discouraged from using sports metaphors and similes. People were, however, welcome to enthuse about swimming pools the size of basketball courts on their own time.
I hate that people look down on these writers, when their diction is superior to ours: because it's their diction that evolves the language (whilst jabbing deserved fingers in the eyes of the standardizers)
The geniuses who say things like "step foot in." While the rest of us are meekly aping whatever talkers and writers we come into contact with, those brave few are toiling upwards in the night - with the whole of human language strapped to their backs. I hope I mean superior in a constructive sense - that they're driving the language's evolution toward, or resisting its entropy from - some divine state. But it might also be superior in a brutal sense - all human language reduces to the ululation of unfulfilled needs, but in amongst us these superior, alphaesque, individuals can expect others to strain to understand them. Probably as well as superior diction they are large and have more splendidly-scuffed knuckles.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/step I can see how it seems weird compared to set foot, but frankly I've always used step. It doesn't really bother me because it's not... wrong. I think. Something like 'for all intensive purposes' would get my hackles up, though.
Me, I think it's the English language being its usual exuberant self, playing with familiar phrases and coining new terms without being very conscious of the logic involved. It's been this way for over a thousand years, and I don't see it changing any time soon. Consider that we used to have "impede" and "expede." The latter fell out of use so thoroughly that the new word "expedite" had to be brought in to fill the gap. Why did the original word disappear in the first place?
