I am surprised no one yet has posted the infuriatingly worthless expression of affectless sympathy:
thoughts and prayers
As a nonnative speaker, the first time I heard the expression was on Bojack Horseman and it confused the hell out of me.
"Do or do not, there is no try"
The rallying cry of the kind of person who thinks every hobby has to become a side hustle.
I feel like that quote is better interpreted as "you haven't failed until/unless you give up." There is also value to "don't go into something without committing to it," but damn not everything has to be a fucking job.
Let's not let those people "have" Star Wars quotes. Same thing when Nazi trash in America tried to co-opt the "Ok" hand sign, Hawaiian shirts, etc. I was a bit dismayed by how fast people were willing to cede those things away. My take is: They can't have them, don't give up so easily.
Unsure if this counts as a quote but here goes.
If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best
Absolute fucking nonsense.
The worst part of this quote is that, in the original, she (Marilyn Monroe) actually framed her "worst":
>I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.
So in the context it sounds more like "here are my flaws - take me or leave me, but you won't change me". Which sounds reasonable. But without that context it sounds more like "I'm entitled because I like to pretend that I'm above other people".
I donβt see it anymore after leaving the hell that is Reddit, but I saw βPlay stupid games, win stupid prizesβ multiple times in every thread.
I mean I get that if used in a context where a person does something with great risk attached and with few and rare good possible outcomes (stupid games). And then they get a bad outcome (stupid prize).
For example Jackass-like stunts.
There are moments where people use more of their bran at once than they usually do.
We call these moments "seizures".
As an epileptic married to a monitor tech, we both had a good laugh when I shared this.
Thanks stranger.
This reminds me of the "you eat X amount of spiders in your sleep every year". It's also been debunked so many times and I see it popping up from time to time.
Even more ironic, this was created by some professor (?) to prove that starting fake viral facts was easy or something...
Man, I always thought that one was suspect. If I eat 10 per year and have been alive 40+ years, then surely one of those times I would have woken up.
If you just add the words on average, suddenly it sounds more realistic, because who knows if there's a guy somewhere sleepwalking in a spider infested place
I've almost never heard anyone quote that, but I've heard numerous people arguing against that statement. So much that I'm wondering it it has mandela-affected people to think it's a more common misconception than it really is.
I do remember it being more common back when I was in high school, and also there was a movie which mentioned that which could have helped with that
I also havent heard it being said seriously for years though
Right, it was the plot for the movie Lucy, where the protagonist increased the brain capacity beyond 10% and upon reaching 100%, she turned into an USB drive. I remember that now.
Not see it. But I hear this one.
"it's always in the last place you look"
No shit Sherlock. Why would I keep looking after I found it?
What people really mean when they say this is
itβs in the last place you think to look
This again is a misnomer because, not just because you stop looking⦠but because people find it hard to admit things are lost. All part of the half serious, half ridiculous psuedo science of Findology (disclaimer: my own blog)
Embarrassingly it took me years to realize what that quote meant. I had always interpreted it to mean that the item is found in an unexpected place. But of course what it really means is that you stop looking once the item is found, therefore that's the last place you looked π€¦
Hard men create easy times.
Easy times create soft men.
Soft men create hard times.
Hard times create hard men.
More cheese => more holes.
More holes => less cheese.
Therefore: More cheese => Less cheese
"Life's not fair." It seems that more often than not the person saying it is in a position to make the situation fair. Usually it is people in positions of power saying it and it feels more like an excuse for their inaction.
"You can't have your cake and eat it too". What is the flaming point of having cake if you can't eat it?
One time I baked a whole entire cake for myself. There was no occasion or anything I just wanted to have a cake and eat it too. It turns out cakes are really big and it's really hard for a single person to eat a cake faster than it turns all spongy and icky.
I wondered about this for years and years, never understanding, especially, since "having cake" and "eating cake" are used interchangeably. But, I finally figured it out! In this sense, the "having" is equivalent to "keeping" or "being in possession of."
Examples:
No eating implied!
Therefore, the saying is more inline with "You can't keep (to show off or admire) your cake, and eat it, too."
OMG. Came here to say that and it was the first one. I especially hate the way people say this as if the person wanting the "cake" was SO ridiculous Like, how dare he!
The expression means "you can't also have the cake in your possession after you've eaten it". It used to be reordered to "You can't eat your cake and have it too" which makes much more sense. "You can't have it both ways" expresses the idea without needing an analogy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_can't_have_your_cake_and_eat_it
For me its the one that promoted me to write this, the futurama quote "you're are technically correct, the best kind of correct"
I hate how people use it over at forums, it is repeated ad nauseam, even if it doesn't make much sense. It's probably from people using it constantly that I hate the quote, and not something that has to do with the meaning.
Fittest means most suited to the environmwnt, not necessarily strongest, fastest, smartest etc
This is from Darwin, I think. It describes the mechanism of selection in evolution: the organisms that are better adapted to their environments are the ones more likely to survive.
Bady likely hates it because it's often misused, by transforming it in a prescriptive statement (from "the fittest survives" to "the fittest deserves to survive) and/or ignoring that what's considered the fittest depends on the environment (e.g. a fish isn't fit in a dry environment, but a cactus isn't fit in the sea).
Also the word 'fitness' is colored a bit by our current corporal culture ('fit' is something one can become of one aspires to be it). Whilst in the Darwinian reading it's more like an accidental occurrence (a mutation made the species more fit by accident).
Worse, he probably refers to social darwinism.
A very nasty school of thought thatβs (partly) responsible for everything from genocide to eugenics.
Social "Darwinism" relies on the fallacy that I mentioned, where you treat a descriptive statement as if it was prescriptive. (And yes, it's nasty.)
"G stands for graphics, so it's gif with a hard g"
The only thing more meaningless than arguing about how to pronounce gif is using that as an argument, and yet it always gets repeated.
Not to mention itβs a made up rule that doesnβt apply to literally any other acronym (radar, sonar, NASA, NATO, scuba, etc.)
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Yeah maybe, but it also makes you stranger.
Also not necessarily true. You might loose a limb and survive, but it could mentally wreck you and you're definitely weaker with one vs. two arms.
Especially virusses and bacteria: Your immune system gets a bit stronger but organs probably have small irreversable damages because there is scartissue where the infection was the worst.
I can only imagine how much people with severe, long-term diseases hate that phrase.
I feel like it's just missing a very big caveat:
What doesn't kill you, and lets you reemerge in a healthy state once it passes, makes you stronger.
That I can more or less agree with. Whatever happened that prompted people to say this will probably still leave a mark though.
My least favorite is
Just be yourself!
Even in grade school I knew this was hogwash. I didn't act the same in class as during recess, or in church as when at the dinner table. Exactly which me was I supposed to be? When someone asks, "What am I supposed to do?" They are really asking, "How should I behave?" And if you've never been on a date before, or this is your first job interview, then it's not obvious.
A: "So, how did the interview go?"
B: "Not so well, he threw my resume away, in front of me, and ordered me to leave."
A: "What? Why?"
B: "Well, I did just as your said, I was being myself. I walked in, gave him the ol' finger guns, then started with my best fart joke."
A: "Why the hell would you do that at an interview?"
B: "Because that routine always slays in the dorms and I was trying to be myself."
Anybody on the autism spectrum just laughs sadly, shakes head quietly, when told 'just be your self'
I don't know, as a ttrpg'er, I'm being someone else every two weeks for three hours are a time. ;)
"The customer is always right" conveniently missing the second part: "...in matters of taste and style".
Also misinterpreting "customer" as an individual rather than as the aggregate of customer demand.