Every day it seems that the writers for the Yahoo! front page display their woeful ignorance of common idioms. Whether they’re telling us “third time’s charming,” or someone is “poking fun of” someone else or an unfamiliar picture doesn’t “strike a bell,” they have new and creative ways of expressing themselves. So, it should come as no surprise that they think Nicole Richie is the splitting image of her daughter:

The expression is “spitting image.” There are many theories about the origin of the expression, but Laurence Horn, professor of linguistics at Yale University, says it is derived from the word spitten. “Spitten image,” according to Horn, refers to “a likeness that was literally spit out, but where figuratively the ‘spit’ in question involved a rather different bodily fluid … inherently more relevant to the transmission of genetic material.”
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