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.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day”
Has an entirely different message to me. It’s often used as a reminder to be patient, not to loose your temper, etc.
On the day Rome was founded Romulus killed his brother Remus and marked out the city of Rome, construction starts. This is my initial reaction.
The next thing the Romans, a group of men (probably criminals), did after founding Rome was to raid their neighbours and kidnap their women. Rome then makes war for the better part of a thousand years, eventually subjugating the known world.
I think it’s better used as a reminder subjugation starts out in small measures. “Parliament just passed antiterrorism laws, I’m sure they’re to protect us” “Rome wasn’t built in a day”
“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)
Hm, this is interesting. I only have a passing understanding of control theory, but couldn’t a positive feedback loop indeed be good when the output is always desirable in increased quantities? A positive feedback loop doesn’t necessarily lead to instability, like you said. So maybe this is just me actually-ing your actually, lol.
As for “more optimal”, oof, I say that a lot so maybe I’m biased. When I say that I’m thinking like a percentage. If optimal is X, then 80% of X is indeed more of the optimal amount than 20% of X. Yes, optimality is a point, but “more optimal” just seems like shorthand for “closer to optimal”. Or maybe I should just start saying that?
This reminds me of a professor I had who hates when people say something is “growing exponentially”, since he argued the exponent could be 1, or fractional, or negative. It’s a technically correct distinction, but the thing is that people who use that term to describe something growing like x^2, are not even wrong that it’s exponential. I feel like when it comes to this type of phrasing, it’s fine not to deal with edge cases, because being specific actually makes what is said more confusing.
“I’m in a negative feedback loop with respect to my laziness which will soon stabilize with me continually going to the gym daily, which is closer to optimal than before. As a result, my energy levels are going to increase exponentially, where the value of the exponent is greater than 1!”
Hmm. Now that I say it that doesn’t seem that crazy. Although I do still think some common “default settings” don’t do any harm.
Those are good points! I can imagine positive feedback to be desirable in some situations and to some extent–a musician’s amplifier needs to have some positive feedback to amplify the frequencies they care about, for instance, but likely also needs some negative to cancel out frequencies they don’t want to amplify, either in the amplifier itself or in the sound booth. Or maybe for some chemical processes, where you always want to make more of product X, and you’re just adjusting the positive feedback to keep the production of X at a certain range of acceptable rates. It all comes down to the math and the desired output! My areas of work are mainly related to areas where negative feedback is desired, but it’s really very context-specific.
As for “more optimal,” I think I picked up the habit of avoiding that phrase due to grad school being my life for so long. A lot of my cohort was very controls-focused in their research, and several of the controls profs would correct presenting/proposing/defending students if they used that phrase, so we got used to either avoiding the phrase entirely or jokingly pointing it out if a fellow student said it. But in my full-time job now, things are much more relaxed with respect to that sort of thing. Maybe in a few years, I won’t hear those profs’ “can you tell me what you mean by ‘more optimal?’” didactic questions in my head when I encounter the phrase 🤣 And yeah, exponential growth is another good example! It’s clear in the colloquial sense, but my engineer-brain still thinks “wait a minute…” when I hear it!
One of the things I remember most from high school biology is “an organism exists in a state of negative feedback, and when that feedback becomes positive it dies”. It applies to way more than just biological organisms, and is less confusing to laymen than anything about valleys in the space of possible configurations.
More optimal is not only wrong but a bullshit, unnecessarily wordy way of saying “better” in the first place.
Interesting! My last biology class is a tiny speck in my rearview mirror, so I’m not sure that I’m understanding it the way your class meant for it to be understood, but I think that that makes a lot of sense. Too much of one kind of input to a living thing without an output to balance it out can be disastrous.
They meant it in a homeostasis kind of way, not matter conservation. If a cell responds to an increase in osmotic pressure with more osmotic pressure it will not be a cell for very long. Ditto for body heat, hormones, cell growth or any number of other things in a multicellular organism. I guess it was just an interesting, birds-eye way of approaching the topic, and most of the other stuff was not as memorable.
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.
Thunder only happens when it’s rainin’
Players only love you when they’re playin’
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
The use of “quantum leap” isn’t about comparing the absolute size of the change to quantum phenomena. It’s about the lack of a smooth transition. Quantum leaps in physics are instantaneous transitions between states with no intermediate. That’s the idea with the colloquialism: a sudden shift from one state to another without a smooth transitional period.
Yeah, a lot of these things actually do make sense, just in a more precise way than even the people using them intend. Gravitational pull is also like this. Earth’s gravitational pull is not weak, it literally keeps everything on Earth tethered to it. More importantly, it happens as an intrinsic property of the Earth, the Earth doesn’t need to “try” to exert gravitational pull on things. Furthermore, gravitational pull attracts more mass which begets even more gravitational pull, like a snowball effect.
So gravitational pull is not about the strength of the force, but the fact that it is natural, effortless, and often forms a positive feedback loop (borrowing from another comment here lol).
So if I say someone at work has a lot of gravitational pull, I’m conveying that they do a good job of bringing other people into their area or work, that they naturally do it almost without even trying to, and that as their social influence grows, they just end up with even more social influence. It’s a really deep metaphor which is also physically accurate.
It’s true, although I doubt most users know that. I wonder if it actually was an idiom before the science was invented/discovered.
“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!
I’m fun at parties!
Would you say you’re a party pooper?
(Likely another example of a phrase that OP was looking for)
Upvote for Flula
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, does not hold true for many diseases including many cancers
My grandma’s version of “5 second rule” is “what doesn’t kill you makes you fatter”
What doesn’t kill you, cripple you for life or leave mental scars, might make you stronger. Chances are, it will make you weaker.
Physical scars can also be a bitch.
What doesn’t kill you might succeed on a second attempt.
Chemotherapy destroyed my immune system and my hearing. But the cancer didn’t kill me, so it’s better than the alternative.
What doesn’t kill you leaves you with a crushing hospital bill (in the US)
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?
Believe that can be credited to Adam Savage in particular.
He attributes it to someone else, but saw its potential where its originator didn’t.
Source: A quick web search turns up the originator’s name as Alex Jason. Savage has talked about it numerous times in YouTube videos and livestreams, which are somewhat harder to dig through.
Why are so many about poop?
Humans are still monkeys. We’re a couple laws and an evolutionary blink away from throwing it around.
I can think of even more, actually, like “shit rolls down the hill” (meaning blame naturally shifts to inferiors) and “hope in one hand, shit in the other and see which fills faster”.
My partner and I went to the zoo for one of our first dates (13 years ago, holy poop) and when we approached the gorilla, he slowly pooped out a giant log into his hand, slowly brought the poo around to the front, stared us directly in the eyes, and took a big ol bite, moving it around with his tongue and teeth.
Everyone was mortified. We couldn’t stop laughing. I wish I had taken a video of it.
Lol, I think we were the entertainment that day.
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.
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.”
Wirth’s law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
Yeah this is a common misunderstanding I’ve had to clarify to people as well, even people who work in tech. I support only using “Law” for things that are scientifically actually laws. I don’t even like to use it as a joke (Murphy’s Law) because, unbelievably, some people really do take that to be a law of the universe too.
Oh god, the cringe techno-optimist shit where you believe every kind of hype at once. The cream does not rise to the top.
Ugh I would struggle to keep a straight face.
deleted by creator
A particularly weird and disgusting one that I heard from far too many adults as a kid, was “pull your finger out of your arse”. This apparently means ‘get a move on’ and/or ‘stop being lazy’.
As a kid with autism it really grossed me out to think all the adults who said this had decided I was slow/lazy because they thought I was regularly putting my fingers in my bum.
Being an adult who has tried most sex stuff now (and also witnessed and spoken candidly with many others who have too), I can unequivocally state that anal play involving fingers, either with a partner or alone, does not correlate with difficulty completing tasks or laziness, either during the act or afterwards. And that the folk I’ve known who have admitted to trying this, are seemingly not any lazier or less efficient than the folk I’ve known who haven’t.
I still don’t know why or how “pull your finger out if your arse” became a phrase meaning what it does, I’m going to hazard a guess it’s based on homophobic stereotypes, but even then why was it said to me as an afab child? Maybe it was supposed to be funny.
Not sure of the etymology of that one either… I assume having one’s finger up their butt isn’t exactly a productive use of time unless the task at hand is butt stimulation. Congrats on the sex though
Butt stuff is over rated imo. Thanks tho.
TBF David is portrayed as the underdog in that story. IIRC Goliath had armour and may have had ranged weapons as well, but David got lucky (through divine intervention) with a difficult, imprecise weapon.
“If I was dictator for a day”, “who made you king” and so on. Autocrats have a lot of power, but it’s always leaky as hell and their position is always precarious. In some ways they’re just the first among prisoners, since if they ever go against the system itself they’re out as fast as Gorbachev was. None of the top officials want their skeletons coming out.
None of the top officials want their skeletons coming out.
I don’t want my skeleton coming out either, I’m using it
I meant the ones in their closet, but when it comes to methods of disposing of political enemies, you never know!
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.
I’ve never seen sub-par used to mean positive, always as “under average”.
Same, but the implication was that it was supposedly being used incorrectly, but then it turns out it is being used correctly after all.
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?
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
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.
I don’t know about ancient duel rules
It was simply a war, and no rules.
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.
I went to catholic grade school and got lessons in the bible often enough
I have not read the bible in probably 30 years but what I remember is that the fight was more like the sheriff coming to town to knock some heads. Goliath was the monster enforcer who was able to just clear the room. Like movie star brute and shit. He was coming to kick some ass and David was just one of the guys in the right place at the right time and with a nasty sling talent. The sling wasn’t really considered a deadly weapon by anyone. David stepped up and one shot the mother fucker in front of EVERYONE
Yeah no, the sling was considered a very very deadly weapon back then. That’s the thing. And that’s not what bible school would want to portray. But the sling as a weapon was pretty much the Magnum Revolver of those days.
How did no one think a weapon that hurls a speeding rock at your head isn’t deadly lol
The giant that decided to not bring a helmet?
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.
Yeah, I don’t think the phrase “learning curve” has any built-in suggestion, even culturally, to imply that the reasonable default assumption is one way or the other. I only ever heard learning curve to refer to something getting easier after awhile, which is indeed a valid 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!
The problem is the location of the steepness makes the difference between whether this means it’s easy first and slow progress later, or slow progress first and easy later. Is it like, x^1.5, or is it like ln(x)? Both are very steep at some point.
Idk it makes sense to me. The learning part is the hard part, once you’ve past the learning curve doing the task is easier because you’ve already learned the stuff you need.
If that’s how it works for you, sure. But that’s not the point. I don’t claim that people learn one way or another, or Wich part is easy. The point is that a “steep learning curve” means something specific in psychology, and people use it to describe something different.
