Beware: alias command in Fedora 8

I’d been doing a lot of work in Fedora 8’s Terminal.  I’m copying files often.  My work with cp caused me to get the overwrite prompt frequently and in an effort to increase productivity I was looking for a way to supress it.  The option I needed was --force.  When I invoked cp with -f it was still prompting me to overwrite the file.  Hmmm. What do I not understand about force?  I sheepishly asked a colleague what is doing on.  He said to type alias and see what I get.  Low and behold alias has cp='cp -i' effectively negating my -f.  Ugh.  Going direct with /bin/cp -f bypasses the alias.  Editing the alias is an option too.