One that comes to mind for me: “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is not always true. Maybe even only half the time! Are there any phrases you tend to hear and shake your head at?
“History repeats itself” or “history doesn’t repeat itself, but rhymes”. If that were the case then it would be pretty easy to predict the future.
The reality is humans have evolved to try to find patterns in a given system. It’s what made us really good hunters and excellent tool builders.
“Boys will be boys”
How about you teach your kid how to behave and respect others so they don’t grow up to be an entitled asshole.
The only democracy in the region
Hey, what happened when the wrong people started winning elections in Iraq when we set up democracy there?
“That’s TOTALLY DIFFERENT”
It’s been a millenium since I’ve heard it, as I no longer qualify as young.
But
“You’ll understand when you’re older”
I’m older.
I’m thirty.
The only thing I “understand” is that all the rules are arbitrary as all fuck, society was made up by idiots with giant sticks up their arses, and everyone should go fuck themselves.
The only “progress” I made is that I stopped hating myself for “failing at society” and started hating society for failing so many people.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.”
This is literally not the definition of insanity.
“Whatever is worth doing, is worth doing well.”
Most things I do, most of what we all do, we do *well enough *. Ain’t nobody got time for doing every bloody thing to perfection.
“Make America Great Again” 😂🤣
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
No. What doesn’t kill you creates trauma.
Well, no, the trauma is the event itself. The reaction to it is post-traumatic stress. If that stress gets in the way of your day-to-day functioning, then it could be called PTSD (but there’s like pages and pages of diagnostic criteria too).
life is beautiful.
no, it’s not. it’s an ugly, parasitic process that accelerates resource consumption merely for its own pointless existence. the heat death of the universe will come all that faster only because of the presence of life.
and, for sure, humankind is the pinnacle of this selfish and greedy outcome of biological evolution.
Life is beautiful. That it even managed to exist, let alone evolve is fascinating, wonderous, fantastical. That certain species mucked things up isn’t life’s fault.
“Trust me.”
Most of the time those two words can be correctly replaced with “I believe you to be an irrational eager to swallow any crap smeared on its filthy snout.”
(People who deserve your trust typically don’t evoke it.)
“Quick question” just means you want a quick answer
I use this, and I struggle a little to disengage when the person I ask interprets it as “help me figure out how to solve this” when they don’t actually have the “short answer”.
I think there is rarely a short answer despite what the question implies
Yeah, that’s fair, especially in software work.
“It is what it is”
No it isn’t
Oh my god this sentence is used whenever I try to take the conversation to a slightly “deeper” level i hate it
That is definitely a thing.
A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or cliché thinking) is a form of loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance.
When you forget what you were about to say:
“Must not have been important”
How in the ever-living fuck could anybody come to that conclusion?
Not important to them, very important to you.
Not a fan of “it is what it is”. It’s called a thought-terminating cliche. It often means “I’m tired of talking about this, do it my way” when my boss says it.
I’ve always liked it. I guess it depends who is saying it because when my old boss said it, it meant more like, “this is the situation we’re in, let’s not waste time arguing about why it is the situation and let’s just focus on dealing with it and going forward”
Yeah it can have wildly different meanings depending on the circumstances in which it’s said. It can be “well we can’t change it, may as well get on with life” all the way to “well this discussion is not gonna change anything, let’s get on with fixing it”. Very similar, but polar opposite sentiments.
Those sentiments seem identical to me.
First one is saying there’s no point fixing anything, just get over it. Second one saying fixing it might suck, let’s fix it anyway.
Very, very different…
Oh? They both read to me as “We can’t change the past, only the future”.
Oedipus begs to differ.
Interesting. I use it to indicate I may not like a situation, but I have to play the have I was dealt to the best of my ability, and sometimes… Well to quote lyrics, “got to know when to hold cem, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”
“Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
God I hate that quote. I can’t tell the difference between a spruce and a pine, but that doesn’t make them indistinguishable, just means I don’t know what the fuck I’m looking at. Magic and tech are definitively distinct. Our monkey brains might mistake one for the other, but like the spruce and pine, that does NOT make them indistinguishable.
Edit - Bruh what’s with the downvotes?? We’re here to express an unpopular opinion, cut me some slack!
I think you got a couple downvotes because you took the quote far too literally. The person who said it did not believe in magic and was not trying to compare a nonexistent supernatural force to hyper advanced technology. If you look up the quote I’m sure you’ll find some essays about what Arthur was getting at.
For a very simple example, suppose an alien showed up and had antigravity tech built into their clothing or even as a cybernetic implant, that let them hover around in the air with no discernible means of propulsion. The average modern human would probably look at that and think “fuckin magic…” because you literally can’t understand or recognize what is going on or how it works.
Or another example using ‘time travel’ instead of aliens. Imagine putting a medieval peasant in the back seat of a fighter jet taking off from an aircraft carrier, or in a VR helmet to experience a virtual trip around the galaxy, zooming around planets and stars. In both cases there are unfathomable things right in front of their eyes everywhere they look. They would have no fucking clue what was going on in either case. To you and me those are normal, understandable things. To the medieval peasant, it’s magic.
Well yeah, but that’s why I dislike the quote. It doesn’t say what it means. Every example of what it intends to convey kinda falls back to the spruce vs pine thing to the uneducated eye. It doesn’t matter if I understand how the alien antigravity socks work -if they’re tech, they’re tech. Hell, I don’t understand how the cell phone I’m posting from works. It could literally be filled with tiny wizards who are actively casting a spell to send my thoughts to Lemmy - I dunno, and I can’t verify. I’m reasonably confident that’s not the case: despite all the functions this device is capable of that do indeed feel magical, that doesn’t make it magical.
The quote doesn’t say it is magic though, actually. It just says, that from our perspective, it’s indistinguishable from magic.
It does not say from our perspective, it just says they’re indistinguishable. Which is incorrect.
from our perspective is implied in every sentence ever.
And no, you can’t expect phrases to “say what they mean”----that would just require them to include more phrases, etc…
