This is very true, and yet the British government message about coronavirus is "stay home" rather than "stay at home". It sounds rather odd to me. I wonder if they chose it to sound a bit more casual and relatable, or just to match what people were already likely to be hearing elsewhere online.
"Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives." has the ring of a Dominic Cummings slogan. It's in the same vein as "Take back control" or "Get Brexit Done". It's campaigning distilled down to the minimum possible words.
It is a bit weird. As a Brit I would say that the first "home" has changed from a noun to a sort of adjective. It has the same type of meaning as fr example "busy" or "asleep". We quite often say "Sally is home" and it has a similar logic to "Sally is busy" or "Sally is asleep".
The leaflet that came through my door says "STAY AT HOME". The Downing Street letter signed by Boris says "you must stay at home". I have seen "stay home" a few times, which I notice, because it seems like bad English to me.
Just thank god they don't decide to prefix it with a hash to make it more trendy twitter-like youngster hipsters whatever like what the French government is doing (#stayhome / #restezchezvous). Now get off my lawn...
Yeah this is a strange one, my brain reads "helps" as a noun here, it takes an extra beat for it to infill a ghost noun between "little" and "helps" ("every little bit helps")
I've never heard that construct. Are you by chance referring to Morton Salt's motto "When it rains, it pours"?
I think it was HN that lead me to the discovered not too long ago that the phrase originated from an early-20th-Century ad campaign of theirs following the introduction of magnesium carbonate, an anti-clumping agent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Salt
No it is a colloquial saying in Britain, especially in the North of England. Me: "I hurt myself at work, then I lost my wallet and my girlfriend left me", Someone else: "It never rains, but it pours".
American: I wrote them British: I wrote to them