What do you expect me to "learn" in this context? I'm a native English speaker, there's nothing to learn here as far as I can see. No one has reported it to be a common phrase in any known dialect and the strongest defense for it is an entry in a community provided dictionary and some people misreading it as other phrases.
I have never said anything was "wrong", I said it was poor communication. Wrong is not a useful concept in language. But the whole point of language is to communicate with others and this sentence is clearly confusing to many people.
> What do you expect me to "learn" in this context?
I have now downgraded my expectations, learning is indeed optional.
> But the whole point of language is to communicate with others and this sentence is clearly confusing to many people.
Or - hear me out - maybe you're not in the target audience of this piece in "The Critic: Britain's Most Civilised Magazine". Not everything is written for everyone, and it's useless to complain about that. But you should at least be able to identify that it is a particular literate British tone, and know if that's your thing or not. If it is, then dig into the idioms. If it isn't then don't read it.