What I mean is like for example, a person having “gravitational pull” or someone making a “quantum leap” makes no sense to anyone who knows about physics. Gravity is extremely weak and quantum leaps are tiny.
Or “David versus Goliath” to describe a huge underdoge makes no sense to anyone who knows about history, because nobody bringing a gun to a sword fight is going to be the underdog but that’s essentially what David did.
I’m looking for more examples like that.
Sleep like a baby. That is not what I’d consider a good night’s sleep.
Sleep like a baby: Scream of horror every hour, cry every 4th, and shit yourself at a random times throughout the night.
Source: Four of them. Luckily, all are past that stage.
Sleep like a geriatric dog
Yeah I’ll take the" sleep like a cat " please
There are a number of idioms that MythBusters tested, some of which were disproven and some of which were confirmed/plausible.
It is easy to punch out of a paper bag.
10 pounds of poop will not fit in a 5-pound bag.
People can easily recognize the backs of their own hands.
Taking candy from a baby is not as easy as it sounds.
People may literally get cold feet when they are scared/timid.
If poop hits a fan it can indeed create a large mess.
You can teach an old dog new tricks.
With an enormous amount of force, it is possible to literally knock someone’s socks off.
In a race, it is not literally better to hit the ground running.
You can polish poop.
Shooting fish in a barrel is fairly easy; the shock wave from a bullet can be enough to kill the fish.
A bull in a china shop will actively avoid hitting the shelves.
A rolling stone truly gathers no moss.
Finding a needle in a haystack is difficult, even with modern technology.
[EDIT: a couple of other idioms not in the idiom section of the link.
It is possible to make a balloon out of lead.
It is not possible to herd cats.
A goldfish’s memory is not limited to three seconds.
]
if a poop hits the fan it can indeed create a large mess.
😭 thanks for testing that, Mythbusters, never would’ve known. what was that quote of theirs? the difference between screwing around and science is writing it down?
Why are so many about poop?
They also tested the thing about toast landing butter side up
And also whether exotic meats taste like chicken
Not quite an idiom, but one of the senior managers at work keeps talking about Moore’s Law in the context of AI stuff like it’s some kind of fundamental law of the universe that any given technology will double in capability every 2 years
- Moore observed that transistor density in microprocessors had historically been doubling every 18 months, and this trend more or less continued for a decade or so after he noted it
- Density has nothing to do with the capability of technology that uses those microprocessors. The performance of the chips roughly doubled every couple of years, but there was a lot more going on with that than just transistor density
- Moore’s law hasn’t held for at least the last decade
- Even when Moore’s Law was still holding ground, it was countered by Wirth’s Law: software is getting slower at a more rapid pace than hardware is getting faster.
Wirth’s law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
Kinda wild how a web pages still take several seconds to load. I remember first hearing about multi-megabyte per second internet and assumed pages will load instantly. Now a webpage is so large it takes compiled languages several seconds to parse them.
Thank you for introducing me to Wirth’s Law. I’ll be citing that whenever I write code that takes forever to run even on powerful compute 🤣
I’m totally guilty too. I’ll be right next to you in that circle of hell reserved for “SWEs who failed to optimize their code.”
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The saying “shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among the stars”. No you won’t, the stars are outside the solar system, they’re much further away than the moon
“Shoot for the moon, and if you miss you’ll end up drifting aimlessly until you die” doesn’t sound as good, but probably works just as well as an analogy
As a dumbass I say: if you go wizing past the moon and nothing else reacts with you, you will eventually end up among the stars.
Below par or under par. Used backwards by everyone. As a golfer, I want to be under par.
Par comes from the Latin word meaning equal and that usage predates the golf term by 300 years.
So sub-par doesn’t really imply the golf way of being good, but actually means below equal/average? Then I’m fine with using below par as a negative.
Aren’t we talking about modern idioms here?
I hadn’t heard this take. Did David cheat by using the slingshot? Was that not allowed? Was this like a duel with rules?
I don’t know about ancient duel rules to say whether bringing a sling was permitted. The take is more along the lines of “David wasn’t an underdog. If anything, David was the clear favourite to win because of his weapon”. Because a sling at the time was a highly effective and deadly weapon which was still regularly used for centuries after the supposed events of that biblical story because of its effectiveness.
People always portray David as a child when it happened too. The Bible describes him as a youth but it doesn’t say how young. I guess because his brothers were already soldiers and he wasn’t, people figure he was a child. I’d say he was a teenager.
Whenever I’ve read that passage, I’ve usually considered his underdog-ness to be from him deciding to not wear even the king’s fancy armor, and from him being the youngest child in his family. So he looked even more dwarfed by Goliath than he would have had he worn armor, and since he wasn’t one of the elder children in his family (despite being a teen or adult), no one in the culture at the time was expecting him to become a hero–much less a king later! But him eschewing the armor in order to keep his agility and range of motion for using a sling makes total sense–I think King Saul was just miffed that his offer of his own personal armor was rebuffed 🤣
EDIT: minor correction
Thunder only happens when it’s rainin’
Players only love you when they’re playin’
Every time I hear this song I just shake my head.
Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?
Absolutely.
“Positive feedback loop” to indicate a situation in which circumstances feeding into each other result in more good things happening, or “negative feedback loop” to indicate bad circumstances feeding into each other to result in more bad things happening.
I have worked with enough controls folks to know that positive feedback in a control loop often leads to instability (bad), while negative feedback in a control loop can be used to stabilize the system (good). It just comes down to the math in the situation.
So people saying that they are in a positive feedback loop can, to a controls person, sound counterintuitive. E.g. “I’m in a positive feedback loop of working out, having more energy as a result, and working out more, making me healthier!” would be momentarily confusing.
I did grad school at an engineering/STEM-focused school, and the campus psychiatrist actually used these terms correctly when discussing anxiety attacks! As an engineer myself, that made my nerdy heart happy 🤣
Another control theory phrase issue: The phrase “more optimal” is incorrect and very well may earn the speaker an “umm, actually” from any controls folks in the conversation. Optimality is not a scale–either something is optimal (with respect to a specific metric), or it isn’t.
(EDIT: reducing verbosity)
There is a “learning curve” to it - used as "it will be easier after a while. It’s the other way around. Learning curve is when you learn like crazy at first, but than after you knock out all the easy wins your progres slows dramaticaly.
Depends on the slope of the curve.
Sure. I could’ve been more precise, when people say or imply a “steep learning curve”.
True, a literally steep learning curve means you’d learn very quickly!
“Does a bear shit in the woods?”
Might be a regional thing but people would often say this as a sarcastic but emphatic “Yes” reply to people, particularly “obvious” answers.
Truth is, my personal observation is that they will make every opportunity to come out on the nearest road or field and shit there.
Obviously one could argue the pedantry (eg rural = woods, or most shit is in wooded areas) but my point is back to there actually being enough nuance to argue the point that they aren’t making the point they think they are when they say that.
I’m fun at parties!
“You cannot have a cake and eat it too?”
Bruv, if I have a cake in my hands, I am going to eat it.
It’s like me giving a back massage to my girlfriend. Things are going to get groped.
Yes, I have a girlfriend. I will not be taking any questions.
