Diogenes, while I agree that «hyperbolic language is silly» and occasionally «disrespectful», if we let "history", the non progressive instances of history, eat up our language then we would lose something extremely precious.
«"When people hear they think"» is an enemy of language and more.
If you wanted to interpret «"occasionally"» in the first sentence of this post as "seldom", because "when people hear they think", instead of "according to occasion", which is what was meant, then that very sentence would be disrespectful. But you should know this was not what was intended.
You know how it works with servers: strict in the output, tolerant in the intake.
