Stepping foot and other turns of phrase I despise

Suddenly it's everywhere. Careless people were writing it before, in blogs and emails, but now it's made its way into actual articles and other places where sloppiness can no longer plead an excuse and the only remaining explanation is plain ignorance. Do people really think that 'stepping foot' is an acceptable way of describing perambulation?

Let's get this clear. If you stepped foot somewhere, that can only possibly mean that you stepped on a foot. It is to be hoped that you weren't dancing at the time. Perhaps you were trying to be clever and abstruse in referring to your own respective feet ('I stepped my right foot, then my left foot, then my right foot again...it was the last time I ever stepped foot in Walmart, I can tell you that!'), but it's still a cumbersome and awkward way of going about it.

If you want to talk about your feet, then think about what it is your feet are doing. If your feet are doing the stepping, then for heaven's sake let them be the subject of the sentence: 'My feet will never step in Walmart again!' Stepping is not something you do to your feet; it is something your feet do. If you want to talk about what you do with your feet, then use a verb that works: 'I will never set foot in Walmart again.' Passive vs. active, people. (Oh, my stars. Do I sound crochety?)

Then there's the growing trend toward substituting then for than, which I think comes not just from sloppy misspelling but from an actual misapprehension of which word means what. (That sort of thing can happen more and more as people read less and learn their lingo from hearsay rather than from the original written form. After all, if one has never seen the word 'could've' spelled out, and one doesn't understand the significance of the contraction, it is perfectly reasonable that one would assume the phrase is 'could of.' I've seen this.)

But back to this particular mondegreen. It crops up everywhere now: 'It is better to be happy then miserable,' for instance. Well, Solomon did say that even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness, but personally, I'd rather be miserable first, and then happy. Heh heh.