What are commonly used idioms/metaphors that make no sense to anyone who knows about the topic they come from?
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Depends on the slope of the curve.
Sure. I could've been more precise, when people say or imply a "steep learning curve".
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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!
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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.
]
Why are so many about poop?
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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".
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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.
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
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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.
]
wrote on last edited by [email protected]They also tested the thing about toast landing butter side up
And also whether exotic meats taste like chicken
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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.
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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.
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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.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]"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)
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What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, does not hold true for many diseases including many cancers
Chemotherapy destroyed my immune system and my hearing. But the cancer didn’t kill me, so it’s better than the alternative.
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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
wrote on last edited by [email protected]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.
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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”
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Sleep like a baby. That is not what I'd consider a good night's sleep.
Yeah I'll take the" sleep like a cat " please
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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
wrote on last edited by [email protected]"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
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"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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
"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!
