I heard about this phrase the other day.
Problem:
The preposition “in” is incorrect.
Explanation:
My friend Nickie F. told me about this phrase.
It seems that someone was telling her about his popularity with his boss.
He said, “Oh well, I guess I’m not the apple in her eye anymore.”
An “apple in one’s eye” is a humorous misstating of the idiom “an apple of one’s eye”, which means a person that one loves very much (FreeDictionary.com).
Good catch, Nickie!
Solution:
“… the apple of her eye …”
My wife saw this the other day on Oprah.com.
Problem:
“For free” is an informal idiom that bothers many readers.
Explanation:
For fun, I checked Google for the idiom “for free” (with the quotation marks) and got about 348,000,000 matches. Wow!
Many readers are bothered by the “for free” idiom because the word “for” is a preposition, prepositions should be followed by nouns or pronouns, and the word “free” is neither a noun nor a pronoun.
The word “free” is either a verb or an adjective. Some use the word “free” as an adverb — as in “running free” — but the correct way to make “free” into an adverb is to add the letters L-Y to the end — as in “running freely”.
One of the definitions of the word “free” as an adjective is without charge, cost, or payment — as in “free nachos with every beer purchased this evening”.
This gives us our solution, given that any preposition — such as “for” — should not be followed by an adjective — such as “free”.
Solution:
“Download it without charge.”
My wife saw this the other day in a seminar handout.
Problem:
The word “apart” — spelled A-P-A-R-T with no spaces — does not belong in this phrase.
Explanation:
The word “apart” as an adverb means into parts or pieces, as in “The tornado blew the house apart.”
The word “apart” can be combined with “from” to form a prepositional idiom that means besides or in addition to, as in “She wrote to no one apart from Jim.”
The word “apart” as an adjective means having unique or independent characteristics and is usually used after the noun that it modifies, as in “an institution apart”.
The word “apart” is NOT a noun, but a noun is what the phrase required, given that the writer was referring to someone not being a member of a group.
Solution:
“… no longer a part of the group”