What's with this phrase "looks to be"?

I think I have ranted here before. This phrase is driving me crazy! What happened to "appears to be"? I am curious as to how the word looks replaced the word appears. Look is an action verb. So how does a person "look to be"? Is it an action that one performs? No it is not!

The verb "be" is a state of being verb, which means it just is...... We are doing the looking, not the item we are looking at, yet the phrase "looks to be" is actually stating that the item that looks is the item being discussed. For example if we say the scar "looks to be" healed, when taken literally, we are stating that the scar is doing the looking and it is looking to see that it is healed (looking at itself) and discovering that it is healed! Duh!

Language does evolve and it is often a movie line or a news journalist or commentator that first uses an unusual phrase and it takes off from there.

I remember in the early 1980s the phrase "at this point in time" became in vogue. All the newscasters were using it. Prior to that time, no one used that phrase frequently. Our electrician was working on my dishwasher when I used this phrase in a conversation with him. He quickly cut me off and said "you mean now." I asked him why he had corrected me like that. He said, the phrase "at this point in time" was being overused and it annoyed him. I became more aware of how quickly catch phrases take off and how they often do nothing to improve meaning in language.

Comments anyone?