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Thinking outside the box of "common wisdom" quotes

 
Pearl Sutton
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There are "common wisdom" type quotes that I see around that just feel inaccurate to me.

"Knowledge is knowing tomatoes are a fruit, wisdom is not using them in a fruit salad." Excuse me? Tomatoes can work really well in fruit salad! Add cherry tomatoes cut in half to almost anything, yellow tomatoes that are low acid to almost anything, and good rich dark red ones anyplace you'd use an acid fruit. I choose to rewrite this one as  "Knowledge is knowing tomatoes are a fruit, creative wisdom is using them well in a fruit salad."

Another one I have seen is "You can't piss and shit at the same time." I think it's supposed to mean something about focusing your attention, probably more biologically accurate for males, but if you are female, you not only can you do it, it's difficult not to. It's a problem when you are trying to separate urine from feces in a composting toilet.

What other "common wisdom" quotes need outside the box thinking?

:D

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Jordan Holland
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"You can't have your cake and eat it too."

I don't know about anyone else, everytime I get cake I eat it.


I just saw a new phrase online, "Sometimes you herp so hard you derp." I'm still pontificating on it, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't belong here, and I think it may become one of my favorite sayings...

And he said, "I want to live as an honest man, to get all I deserve, and to give all I can, and to love a young woman whom I don't understand. Your Highness, your ways are very strange."

 
Jack Edmondson
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The glass is neither half empty or half full.  It is completely full unless you live in a vacuum.  
 
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A penny saved is a penny earned!

You gotta spend money to make money!

Please give me your thoughts on my Affordable, double-paned earthbag window concept

 
Jack Edmondson
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Significant Other:  "Do you want to be happy or right?"

Me: I believe I can be both happy and right...as long as I remain single!

"Happy Wife - Happy Life!"  ...because there is always a third option.  
 
Douglas Alpenstock
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Rob Lineberger wrote:A penny saved is a penny earned!

You gotta spend money to make money!


Does that mean a penny saved is a nickel earned?
 
Sonja Draven
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Jordan Holland wrote:"You can't have your cake and eat it too."

I don't know about anyone else, everytime I get cake I eat it.


I just saw a new phrase online, "Sometimes you herp so hard you derp." I'm still pontificating on it, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't belong here, and I think it may become one of my favorite sayings...


I always feel annoyed when people quote that to me. Because seriously why have cake if you're not going to eat it?

I learned though that this originated as you can't eat your cake and have it too. Which makes WAY more sense.

The wishbone never could replace the backbone.

 
Jordan Holland
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Sonja Draven wrote:

Jordan Holland wrote:"You can't have your cake and eat it too."

I don't know about anyone else, everytime I get cake I eat it.


I just saw a new phrase online, "Sometimes you herp so hard you derp." I'm still pontificating on it, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't belong here, and I think it may become one of my favorite sayings...


I always feel annoyed when people quote that to me. Because seriously why have cake if you're not going to eat it?

I learned though that this originated as you can't eat your cake and have it too. Which makes WAY more sense.



Yeah, I imagine many of them originally made more sense, but somehow morphed into what we hear today. Pearl has a good point though, why do we still say them?

And he said, "I want to live as an honest man, to get all I deserve, and to give all I can, and to love a young woman whom I don't understand. Your Highness, your ways are very strange."

 
T Melville
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"It's always the last place you look."

Gee, ya think? Oh, I found it a while ago, why do you ask? Why wouldn't I keep looking?

My farm and garden: https://trello.com/b/GqBLwdNh
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Pearl Sutton
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Jordan Holland wrote:
Yeah, I imagine many of them originally made more sense, but somehow morphed into what we hear today. Pearl has a good point though, why do we still say them?


Some of them are also out of context in this society. "Waking up on the wrong side of the bed" was a reference to Medieval fear of anything to the left being evil, if you got out of bed on the left side, your whole day would be influenced by the devil. Waking up a bit cranky or sore is nowhere NEAR as bad as if you seriously believe the devil will influence your whole day. It's gone from an intense culture wide fear, to a casual comment.

Why do people still say them? I think a lot of that has to do with the path of least resistance. It's easier to say something that has been said a lot of times (so it must be right) than to think about it and decide what words are really what you want to communicate. Just as it's easier to walk in a cleared pathway than to cut across, even if the path doesn't go exactly where you want to go, people find communication habits are easier when they stay on the habitual, well cleared paths, of old sayings, even though they may not be what is meant. To say "Oh, you slept in a bad position and hurt this morning" takes more thought than "You woke up on the wrong side of the bed" as the pathways in the mind for the habitual expression are better cleared, even if that path does not clearly communicate what is meant.

Gardens in my mind never need water https://permies.com/t/75353/permaculture-projects/Gardens-Mind
Castles in the air never have a wet basement https://permies.com/t/75355/permaculture-projects/Maison-du-Bricolage-house

 
Rob Lineberger
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The bed thing reminds me of the look of horror people get on their face when they say "how are you" and I respond with an actual answer.  It's one of the social niceties I've reclaimed, saying "fine, how are you" completes the ritual.

Please give me your thoughts on my Affordable, double-paned earthbag window concept

 
Jordan Holland
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I agree. It's not a big deal when people do it with cute sayings, but what is concerning is when the same behavior spills over into actions. A relatively benign example is qwerty keyboards. Why TF are we still teaching kids to use something intended to be so inefficient? It also applies to major things. It is even a big roadblock in permaculture.🙁

And he said, "I want to live as an honest man, to get all I deserve, and to give all I can, and to love a young woman whom I don't understand. Your Highness, your ways are very strange."

 
Douglas Alpenstock
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Rob Lineberger wrote:The bed thing reminds me of the look of horror people get on their face when they say "how are you" and I respond with an actual answer.  It's one of the social niceties I've reclaimed, saying "fine, how are you" completes the ritual.


Other responses that don't descend into TMI and end on a positive note:

"Well, the glass is half full. Beats the alternative, haha!"

"About a 6 out of 10. But I'm working on it!"

"Still on the right side of the grass. That counts for something!"
 
Carla Burke
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Ahh, but the querty keyboards were actually designed specifically for efficiency - in two-handed speed-typing - as it was originally meant to be used. The keys are arranged so that most used letters and punctuation in the English language are the easiest to reach with the strongest fingers, with the lesser used ones out by the pinky and ring finger, the space bar is set to reach with either thumb,  shift bars to the outer edges, to touch with either pinky, so that the much less typically used characters and punctuation can be easily accessed, without cluttering the primary keyboard. The numbers are across the top, because they're less used, but later, fancier keyboards also included the numbers to the right, for the right-handed accountants and record keepers...

The reason is never been changed, it's because it's become a pretty universal setup, there are still enough of us out here that grew up with it to make it a HUGE issue, especially for those who still use it for work in fields which require it, and because it would be outrageously costly to change it all. Not to mention, trying to decide a better way - and making it universal would have the entire world in fits.

The only thing...more expensive than education is ignorance.~Ben Franklin

 
Jordan Holland
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I've never thought about it from a perspective of fatigue or anything like that, but I was under the impression that it was invented after many people were having issues jamming up typewriters from typing too quickly. Maybe that's an urban myth, though, but I thought it was true. And I thought it was pretty official that the DVORAK or MALTRON layouts were more efficient...maybe it's a personal matter. It just goes to show how we sometimes end up in situations where we don't really know what's what, or where we came from, haha.

And he said, "I want to live as an honest man, to get all I deserve, and to give all I can, and to love a young woman whom I don't understand. Your Highness, your ways are very strange."

 
Douglas Alpenstock
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Hijack cont'd: My understanding is that QWERTY was developed for early mechanical typewriters to prevent the type bars from jamming together. It's not for the ergonomic benefit of the typist, that's for sure. Since it's survived 150 years, I think we're stuck with it for a while longer. A hundred years from now, keyboards will probably be considered quaint.

 
Pearl Sutton
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Hijack continued: Yes, QWERTY was laid out to keep the most used keys from tangling up when using a manual typewriter. I can type QWERTY, took classes in school. When I bought my first computer in 1991, I was a working deep tissue massage therapist, my hands are my professional tools, I studied the options, and learned to use Dvorak as it was laid out to be the least hand strain for typing in English. At this point I type very fast and my hands never hurt from it. It was worth the learning curve.  The current crop of kids are still being taught QWERTY, and that bugs me. I can see having the legacy layout available for full hand typing on by people who are used to it, but train the next generation to use something more appropriate. A phone screen laid out in QWERTY and hard to change is absurd in my mind. I don't think Dvorak is the right layout for a phone, seems to me someone has to have figured out the best layout by now, but QWERTY is still there. Computers are clever enough to layout any way they want to be, and if keycaps move easily, (which they often don't) configuring the keyboard for a given user isn't much problem.

I made stickers for my laptop keycaps, the primary letters are Dvorak, the secondary ones in the corners are QWERTY for when I need it. Me being me, I matched my screen...

Gardens in my mind never need water https://permies.com/t/75353/permaculture-projects/Gardens-Mind
Castles in the air never have a wet basement https://permies.com/t/75355/permaculture-projects/Maison-du-Bricolage-house

 
Mike Haasl
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"It is what it is" bugs the hell out of me.  No shit, of course it is.  I usually reply with "It ain't what it ain't".

"Hundreds of years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in or the type of car I drove... But the world may be different because I did something so bafflingly crazy that it becomes a tourist destination"

 
Jordan Holland
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Mike Haasl wrote:"It is what it is" bugs the hell out of me.  No shit, of course it is.  I usually reply with "It ain't what it ain't".



That reminds me of something I heard for another common saying, "Working hard or hardly working?" Just punch them in the throat and reply, "Breathing hard or hardly breathing?" Hahahaha!

And he said, "I want to live as an honest man, to get all I deserve, and to give all I can, and to love a young woman whom I don't understand. Your Highness, your ways are very strange."

 
s. lowe
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You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you eat your cake then you won't have it anymore. If you have it then you haven't eaten it yet
 
greg mosser
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just cut a slice?
 
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When in doubt, throw it out!

Don't cry over spilled milk!  (Beer, on the other hand ...)

I, myself.  (Once I actually heard "I, myself, personally".)



Also annoying:  Folks who begin their sentences with the word 'So'.

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Sean Brown
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Still on the right side of the grass. That counts for something!"
Are we really sure this is a good thing? Sometimes i wonder.
 
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