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by elevaet 1495 days ago
Multiple origins are probably more common than we think. We tend to be biased to want to see singular causes of things, but language is often a murky soup full of feedback cycles.

In the example you gave, if it is not an origin, it could at least be a lingual context that supports the expression, because it does not contradict it.

Language evolution must be full of nuances like that, that we can barely observe.