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.
Religious bs
"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.
You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.
This is what I wanted to say but didn't have the words for. Thanks.
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".
"We only use x% of our brain."
Simply not true as shown since years by neurology
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.
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 don’t see it anymore after leaving the hell that is Reddit, but I saw “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” multiple times in every thread.
I haven't seen "fuck around and find out" since the old Reddit days, either.
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.
Usually as a way of being racist, too.
I don't know who has to hear this but
I don't know who has to hear this but
that's a phrase, not a quote.
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?
I always thought that was the joke?
I must say, in retrospect it kind of seems obvious, but this has somehow blown my mind
One time I kept looking just to prove that statement wrong. I think I was 4yo.
What people really mean when they say this is
it’s 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 🤦
Hard men create easy times.
Easy times create soft men.
Soft men create hard times.
Hard times create hard men.
Man creates dinosaurs
Dinosaurs eat man
Woman inherits the earth
Which is ironically said the most by soft men who grew up in easy times.
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 think it suppose to mean that you can't use the cake as decoration after eating it.
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
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:
- "What's it like having a Mercedes Benz?"
- "The Smiths have a very nice home."
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."
"Don't be evil." -Google
Both hate and laugh it.
"You are your own worst enemy."
I hate it most when it's true.
"You dropped this king"
Idk why but I always cringe when I see that.
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.
"Survival of the fittest" (when used without trying to understand its actual meaning).
What is its 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).
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."
ask yourself: is it possible to be anybody else? no? then this saying is non-nonsensical!
I don't know, as a ttrpg'er, I'm being someone else every two weeks for three hours are a time. ;)
Anybody on the autism spectrum just laughs sadly, shakes head quietly, when told 'just be your self'
"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.
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.
"its not that deep" sometimes it is
"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.
"P stands for photographic, so it's JPEG with an f sound" is the one that gets me
OK jif
Not to mention it’s a made up rule that doesn’t apply to literally any other acronym (radar, sonar, NASA, NATO, scuba, etc.)
The good old GNU/Linux quote.
I like Stallman's ideas on free software but this whole GNU/Linux thing is an absolute waste of time and I hate how it still gets brought up.
Stallman defended pedophilia for years, duck him.
Hitler was a vegetarian, but does that mean vegetarianism is bad? Don't discredit the ideas because you dislike the person.
Let me interject for a moment!
What you guys are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux. Thank you for taking your time to cooperate with with me, your friendly GNU+Linux neighbor, Richard Stallman.
"pull yourself up by the bootstraps" it's literally impossible
I always thought that was the point of the phrase.
Oh sweet summer child
Yeah we get it, we've all seen Game of Thrones, too. If you have to be a condescending dick, at least be original.
I use that sometimes on my kids. But I've never seen GoT. That phrase WAY predates that show.
Uhm. GoT isn't exactly the first to use this expression...
Oh you sweet summer child
