During a meeting at work this morning, I was trying to describe a situation wherein a bad task that I had shaken off after years was returning to my job duties. In describing this, I was searching for an old saying I remembered from my youth about a “bad penny,” but it escaped me.

So, now at home, I researched the saying:

Basically, “Turning up like a bad penny” refers to someone — or in my case something — unwelcome returning to one’s life after a long absence. If a person, it could be someone who harmed you or took advantage of you in the past, or even a former lover in a relationship gone much too sour; if a thing, it could be old debts, old unpleasant situations, or in my case more specifically, old hated job duties.

Here is the best description I found:

…when the term ‘bad penny’ first appeared in the 18th century, pennies were serious money. This made them ripe targets for counterfeiters, and to reach into your pocket or purse and discover that you had ended up with such a counterfeit coin, a ‘bad’ penny, was a depressing and annoying experience…. Thus ‘bad penny’ became an idiom meaning ‘an unwanted thing that keeps showing up’.

Amen.

When I watch television, especially the live sort where so-called educated people mangle the language daily, I find myself correcting people as they speak.

For instance, if someone says, “If I was you,” I correct it in my mind to “If I were you,” using the proper plural (conditional) form of the verb.

It was interesting to see such correcting done on a TV series, the tongue-in-cheek (so to speak) “Silicon Valley,” which aired Sunday (April 29).

When Dinesh said something like, “My code had less errors than yours,” Gilfoyle corrected him, saying, “Fewer.” (Later, of course, in a reverse, Gilfoyle would use “less” incorrectly too.)

Look at up: Fewer refers to quantity, or number; less to weight or volume.

Now, if I was Dinesh…