[retsibsi]

Your original complaint was that the phrase is meaningless. To people who are familiar with it, it's obviously not meaningless! For those who are unfamiliar with it, I'd say the bafflingness is more feature than bug; you'll immediately know that you've encountered an unfamiliar phrase (or missed a word), rather than trying to piece it together logically and coming away with an illusion of understanding.

(Yeah, it would be even better if it just made sense transparently and unambiguously to all listeners. But that leaves us with a complaint about idioms in general, not this one in particular.)