"A Pair Of" Miff

This little phrase really gets me. You say a pair of sneakers. Cool. That's two. You say a pair of scissors. Not cool. It's only one! Do you refer to each blade as a scissor? Same goes with clippers, shears, stuff like that. You never refer to them in the singular, always plural. I'm ok with words that serve a dual purpose for singular and plural, like Deer, Fish, Buffalo, all that jazz.

Random observation: everything in that miff list refers to something that's meant to cut. Odd.

Emphasis Miff

Hey guys! Post number two of the day here, and it's only 12:26 A.M.! I'm back with another English miff, or should I say miffs? There are actually multiple issues here, so I'll just do a list:

• Misuse of quotation marks. Example: someone wants to emphasize the fact that there is no running water in a bathroom. As such, they decide to put up a sign. It reads: No "Water". Really? So, there's no "Water" in the bathroom. Cool. Is there regular water? Did the bathroom ever have water, or was it just something that looked and acted like water?
• Misuse of underlining/bold text. Also another emphasis issue. Example: a sign reads "Wet Paint!". Now, there are worse uses of underlined/bold text, but I think this demonstrates my meaning nicely. As opposed to advertising that the paint is wet and therefore shouldn't be touched, at the very least for the sake of keeping the paint looking nice, what is advertised is that there is paint. Never-mind that the paint is wet,  all you really need to know is that there is paint, and so you should stay away.

"All But"

That little phrase really annoys me. In the English language, the phrase "all but" is commonly used to say something is "almost". Example: something that is "all but impossible" is interpreted as "near impossible", or "practically impossible". This annoys me. Why? Because when you say all, you mean everything. When you say but, you mean contrary, except, that, than, or only. So really, what this should come out to is everything but, or everything except. Substituting, "all but impossible" becomes "everything except impossible". See what happened there? Using substitution -and not invalid substitution- we have changed the meaning of "all but impossible" from "near impossible" to "everything except impossible", which is to say, not impossible, or possible. And this really throws my brain for a loop, because I know that both interpretations are right, but no-one will interpret "all but impossible" as "possible", simply because it is not commonly used that way. And that makes me angry, because I'd like to use it to mean "something isn't", as opposed to "something is". Would you agree?