@Anonymous wrote:I've always been amused by near miss
If your nearly miss something,don't you hit it?
Could just be a young lass, standing very close.
It still (mostly) makes sense as a two-word phrase, but can be one of those things that sounds wrong.
If you compare 'near miss' to 'nearly missed', you can see a very clear distinction and difference in meaning.
Also, consider the phrase "near bear' 
A bear is near, indeed it is very near. The bear is so near it's almost touching, but this is a not a touching bear, it's just a near bear.
@lyndal1838 wrote:By the rule of double negatives a fake counterfeit item is a real item.
Not necessarily, it could be an attempt to pass something off as a real counterfeit when it's a fake attempt at a valuable collectable (or cfollectible) counterfeit.
Without, of course, falling into infinite recursion.
