I hate to be a pedant, but it’s interesting how spoken speech sometimes get convoluted with written speech and we get to see silly phrases like “neck in neck” rather than “neck and neck”.
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/neck+and+neck
You’re absolutely right, and I didn’t even notice how silly that phrase was. Thanks!
This is because we generally speak our language transparently, saying X because it means Y without knowing or thinking about how X came to mean Y. When we write quickly, we tend to transcribe the sounds of what we say, and somehow hope the spell checker will catch our errors. I cringe at some of the errors in my own FR posts.