Bonus points if it’s usually misused/misunderstood by the people who say it

1 point

“Literally 1984”… unless I’m asking you what year the Macintosh 128k came out I don’t wanna hear it.

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1 point

“We only use ten percent of our brains.”

People genuinely believe this and never learned where it came from.

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1 point
*

Where did the myth come from?

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1 point

It came from early on in studying the brain. A scientist said that we only understand what 10 percent of the brain does, and everyone ran with a misunderstanding of that idea.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains here. https://youtube.com/shorts/E4EjYfUBEvw?si=LO3GIURgZesHjo85

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1 point

Sidenote, why does everyone hate Neil these days?

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1 point

That and the “Alpha Male” garbage. Even the author of the study on wolves has said repeatedly that his study was totally wrong. And yet some people continue to reference it and apply it to humans when even the original study wasn’t about people.

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1 point

People love excuses for bad behavior, no need to verify them. Sigh.

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1 point

“think of how stupid the average person is, and then think half of them are dumber than that”

So heavily overused.

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1 point

This was actually the quote that inspired this thread. I love George Carlin but I hear this all the time online and I hate it

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1 point

The people saying it aren’t usually in the half they think they are, either.

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1 point

95% of people think they belong to the top 5%.

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1 point

“Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

An individual, uneducated observer might not be able to tell them apart, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a distinction.

One of the avengers movies dropped that line, and I feel like it’s spread like wild fire since then, and it’s just objectively not correct.

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0 points

I understand much of the technology we use today isn’t magic, but it may as well be with how much I understand about how it works.

I don’t think you quite grasp what Arthur C Clarke was going for with this one.

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1 point

I get what he was going for, I just think it was poorly executed.

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1 point

“Blood is thicker than water” followed by the equally erroneous “covenant” explanation.

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1 point

Well, maple syrup is thicker than blood, so should I move to Canada?

It’s sad that such an answer isn’t possible in my language, our version goes “blood is not water”.

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1 point

English is not my first language, so I don’t know every English saying, could you spell out what you mean?

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1 point

Basically, the family you’re related to should always come first (that includes first before the people you have chosen to live with, like your partner) because you “share blood”.

Usually said by people whose only “quality” as a person is being related to someone.

Seriously, if someone tells you this unironically, there’s a pretty huge chance you should review your entire relationship with them and more often than not you should just stop talking to them whatsoever.

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0 points

Thanks for the explanation, sometimes there are words I already saw somewhere but never bothered to look them up when they appear so rarely. This was only the second time in my life I read the word “covenant” the first time was for a videogame called Alien: Covenant, but I thought it was some science fiction term.

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