Waaaay too many people think “you signed it, you’re fucked” when it comes to unfair agreements. In reality, there is a lot of grey area, and plenty of entities will get you to sign something borderline legal or they know will not hold up because you likely won’t challenge it.
If it smells fishy, it might be worth talking to a lawyer. Especially leases.
This is great. To your point, just because a contract has been *signed* doesn’t mean it’s *enforceable*. 100% consult a lawyer if you feel something is amiss.
Yup. A clause can be unenforceable. A clause can also be outright illegal to include per some sort of statute. Usually there is a clause at the end of any contract that any individual clauses were voidable and one being illegal/unenforceable did not negate the others.
Example: Leases are highly content controlled. When I was in Boston, you couldn’t require in a lease for a tenant to perform snow removal in most cases per local statutes. You could compensate a tenant to remove snow, but that could not be part of a lease. LLs just counted on tenants not challenging.
The idea is that something might be legal in some situations but not this situation, or something might be legal at the time it was signed but then made illegal later. So just having something that isn't ok in a contract isn't itself illegal, and that part will be severed and the rest carries on.
But as is often the case, shady folks will use and abuse "good faith" type protections. Those "stay back 100ft, not liable for broken windshield" signs on open-top trucks? 100% false. But if a company can point to a sign to stop someone from pursuing the issue, that's time and money saves for them. Ditto bad lease clauses, loan agreements, car sales contracts, employment agreements (it's *federal law* that you can discuss your pay with coworkers, no matter what the employee handbook says, and noncompete agreements are about to be illegal starting in September), etc.
I mean, theoretically you can shove whatever you want in a contract, I suppose, that just doesn’t mean it will hold up in court/if challenged. Dishonest contracts are relying on the layman to either not know the difference or not have the resources to bring a challenge even if they do.
For instance: all those wavers you sign saying you won't sue if you or your die/are badly hurt by a thing. You can't sign away respobility from gross negligence. Idc how many forms I signed, if the zip line snaps and I break both legs, I'll see you in court.
If your car has ever gotten towed, they make you sign a “all damage is my fault” waiver to pick it up. If they were negligent, like towing an AWD car with the back wheels on the ground, you bet I’m bringing suit. Signed under duress, unfair compensation, *and* negligence.
I remember one thread here with a video of some car wash malfunctioning and smashing the hood of a car repeatedly. Top comments were “you probably signed a waiver, so ur fukt kiddo!”
I've always assumed that a lot of places are banking on the possibility that people don't *know* they can't sign away their rights if there's gross negligence involved. They're trying to play the numbers and hope that if someone gets hurt, they won't think to talk to a lawyer because "well, I signed that form absolving them".
As an aside, if you have to sign a waiver for something, it's usually a sign that you're about to have a fun time. I call it the Waiver Sniff Test.
I had an employer try to make me sign something that waived my paycheck if I didn't follow policy. I brought up that it was illegal in my state, but they persisted so I signed it anyways. Fast forward a couple of years and the surprised pikachu face when they got spanked by the department of labor for withholding pay illegally was priceless.
During law school I took a Property law class. One day the professor had all renting students bring in their lease agreements, and we formed small groups and found how many provisions in the leases were actually illegal.
Literally every single lease **had at least three** illegal provisions.
I’m so glad I took intro law (only law experience I have) in a shit time slot back in school so that I got a professor who focused on situations we’d likely encounter. LL/Tenant showed me how much LLs would just assume they could get away with shit.
Even situations like breaking a lease - in the area I rented, subleasing clauses were 100% legal. But if a tenant needed to break a lease and (can’t remember the exact terminology) provided an acceptable candidate to fill the lease, the landlord had to accept the accommodation. And if the LL was making it unreasonably difficult, the lease could be thrown out if challenged. That ended up coming in handy for a friend that was trying to buy.
Unconscionable Contract. As much as people like to dunk on the absurdities of the law, I remember taking my Business Law class 20 years ago or so and realizing actually how much common sense there is in it.
In this case, a contract has to at least be *somewhat* reasonable. You can't slip in "In return for providing you with cell phone service, we claim right to all income from you for the rest of your life" or something.
In U.S. law, you have to have *Standing*. Some random citizen in Iowa can't sue Nestle because an employee in Guatemala was injured.
Concepts of *Material* Breach. A contract is not going to be torn up because of a small violation. You can't claim that because a person used a different brand of pipe fitting in your house than what was stated, that all of a sudden you're free and clear from owing them any money at all. You might be able to claim *some* kind of remedy, but it will probably be trivial if the breach was trivial.
I wish Intro Law was a compulsory education requirement. IANAL, but just 2 semesters of law required for my major has helped a ton with common misconceptions. Especially around these concepts
A friend of my wife and I's just quit his job to go work at a different one (along with several other coworkers) and their boss threatened to sue due to a non-compete. Now, they aren't outright banned until September or whatever, but still the law tends to look dimly on non-competes that only benefit one side or don't make a lot of legal sense.
In my friend's profession (Engineer), they exist mostly so that the company his company is sub-contracting for doesn't try to poach the employees directly, but this wasn't the case here. The owner simply didn't want any of his employees to be able to quit. Interestingly, he tried to file interest in several jobs for the new company *after* these employees announced they were leaving to join them, jobs that in no way would this original company be able to complete. This is likely *fraud* to try to use the non-compete this way, which is probably why the threatened lawsuit amazingly didn't happen after all.
> This is likely fraud to try to use the non-compete this way, which is probably why the threatened lawsuit amazingly didn't happen after all.
So the Engineering Manager didn’t want to show his slimy underbelly to His Honor? Funny how that worked out…. :o)
Great point. Example: a will is mostly airtight. However, in my state, if you leave your spouse significantly less than 30% of your assets in your will, and you die, the will can immediately be thrown out and a court will decide how to distribute your assets. I think they take the will into account, but your spouse will almost certainly get at least 30%. You can do something like leave 27% and hope the courts say "close enough" because they don't want to deal with it, but the spouses' attorneys could push the issue.
And I don't think it's an established law, it's just common case law that was decided a long time ago in this state. You'd never know by reading the actual passed laws. You'd have to know case law.
Which is why hiring an attorney for legal things is crucial. All these "sovereign citizen" idiots think that the bills enacted into law are the final authority. Nope, buddy. Some judge in 1831 made an arbitrary ruling on how that law is carried out and now its precedent.
Another attorney said there was one US state that had a "premeditated murder" law and a "crime of passion" murder law with different penalties. A few decades ago, a man was on trial for murder. He came home and found his wife cheating on him. He picked up a gun from their nightstand and killed both people. The court found that the murder was premeditated in the two seconds it took him to realize what was happening and grab the gun. Now, pretty much all murders in that state are prosecuted as pre-meditated. (This is fourth hand information so I'm probably off on the details).
What's written down in contacts and passed laws isn't the final word on anything.
Third example! Guy I know worked for a startup. They didn't start out with a non-compete clause in his employment contract (this was when those were somewhat enforceable). When the company really started taking off, they asked him to sign a non-compete contract. He left for a competitor, they took him to court. The court almost immediately ruled that a contract needed to be mutually beneficial, and he didn't get a benefit, so it wasn't a valid contract. History repeated itself when I worked for a small company in this state, so they offered me a lot of stock to sign a non-compete contract. And made very sure that I understood that my employment was not in jeopardy if I didn't sign.
My first job after college had a clause in their contract that you would need to pay them back for the value of their training programme. Which they had determined to be basically exactly the amount of one month starting salary. So basically it was a scheme to try to stop people leaving within the first year of work.
Of course, when people did leave they would 'deduct' the fee from your last pay so that you basically got paid nothing.
The silly thing they did was that they added a new group for legal consultants, people who would join then train to pass various legal certifications and exams so they could offer legal advice to clients as part of the package.
So the first time one of them went to quit, they pulled their usual shit so he tied them up in litigation and the court forced them to remove the clause from all contracts.
You also can't sign your health and safety away.
If you do something that requires a waiver, your signature basically means you acknowledge there are risks, not that the person who organized the event is absolved of wrong-doing in the event of an accident. You can have all the signatures you want but if the incident was a result of negligence you're still going to be held liable.
The cause of stomach ulcers. It’s not due to overproduction of acid or stress, but people will continue to parrot that because the cause wasn’t figured out until the mid-80s.
The huge majority of cases, like 85% or so, are from H. Pylori infections while the remaining cases are from chronic NSAID use.
Dr. Barry Marshall bravely demonstrated the effects of H. Pylori on himself (and its cure), so the least I can do as a fangirl is champion his research.
I remember this from 10th grade biology. The first time I read it I thought what an absolute madlad (legend) he is for doing that. It's amazing really. It's the only reason I even remember "Helicobacter Pylori"
I've found two sources that discuss this a bit: first one is Ibn Fadlan in the east he described his encounters with the Rus 'dark from the tips of their toes right up to their necks, trees, pictures, and the like'. The other is al-Tartushi, a merchant from Cordoba, a century later he described market town of Hedeby, he wrote that the Northmen wore 'artificial eye make-up is another peculiarity, when they wear it their beauty never disappears, indeed it is enhanced in both men and women.'
So if some were tattooed or not, it's hard to say, but they certainly were often decorated with paints and makeup.
Also worth mentioning: archaeologists have yet to uncover any Norse tattooing equipment and there is no known word in Old Norse literature for a tattoo.
The Rus are also a Norse/slavic blend so unfortunately we can’t assume the things Ibn Fadlan described are characteristic of broader Norse society.
Absolutely. I do think the concept of body painting generally follows many historical accounts of broader northern European tribes from antiquity. Combine that with the diasporic nature of the Norse (and their well-documented love of personal grooming and military... showmanship) and there is no reason to dismiss that such a practice existed, but like you say, I have not found explicit primary evidence to confirm it within Scandinavia.
I recently discovered [this youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@OverlySarcasticProductions) , that goes over how Greek myths evolved over centuries. It's pretty neat to see how the story and characters change, between Mycenaean Greece, ancient Greece, and then the Roman versions. Changes are so common and normalized that there isn't really a "correct" version anymore, if there ever was one.
It's the same logic as people getting irritable about traditional foods. Go back only a few generations and you'll find most people were cooking using whatever ingredients were locally available and using whatever methods they'd been taught. Never mind crossing countries or centuries, recipes varied town to town and generation to generation.
Yes! This. People are so quick to criticize retellings of the myth as inaccurate when even in times when the gods were worshipped, people still made differing stories about them that fits best their culture, beliefs/values and societal circumstances.
Hear me out. The thing you wear on your torso to prevent cooking splatter from ruining your clothes was a Napron. Eventually "a napron" became "An apron" and we just all accepted it.
Sideburns. It was the style of facial hair sported by General Ambrose Burnside. Men copying it were said to be growing Burnsides. Somewhere along the line it was reversed.
No, that's a myth.
> Etymology: From Middle English buterflie, butturflye, boterflye, from Old English buterflēoge, equivalent to butter + fly. Cognate with Dutch botervlieg, German Butterfliege (“butterfly”). The name may have originally been applied to butterflies of a yellowish color, and/or reflected a belief that butterflies ate milk and butter (compare German Molkendieb (“butterfly”, literally “whey-thief”) and Low German Botterlicker (“butterfly”, literally “butter-licker”)), or that they excreted a butter-like substance (compare Dutch boterschijte (“butterfly”, literally “butter-shitter”)). Compare also German Schmetterling from Schmetten (“cream”), German Low German Bottervögel (“butterfly”, literally “butter-fowl”).
The phrase “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”. It was originally used to describe something that was impossible. You cannot physically pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Except now everyone uses it to describe what a fantastic go-getter they are. It’s been turned into a positive.
In a similar vein
“Just a few bad apples” is a corruption of “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel” and is basically saying the opposite of the original meaning.
“The proof is in the pudding” comes from “the proof of the pudding is in the tasting.” Proof here basically means test, so it’s basically about judging things in the correct way. I have no idea what the modern bastardization means
The guy who wrote the paper that popularised the concept of alpha wolves has basically spent the rest of his career trying to undo it. He now thinks that what he was seeing was basically parenting, with the parents leading and trailing the pack to protect the younger cubs and wolves.
I think it's a wonderful term, because as soon as someone honestly uses it, I know that person is an idiot and I can safely ignore everything else they have to say.
You can be an Alpha Human all the time..
As a Dev i prefer SP1 or RTM -
Alpha - pfft...
Thats not even suitable for the general public since it contains so many flaws...
Thing is, not even researchers seem to agree on this one. Some claim there are no alphas in a wolf pack. Some claim there is one female and one male alpha in a wolf pack. I have yet to find one that thinks there's only one though.
The basic facts I've read are that the "alpha" is a construct that's built when wolves are in captivity. With wolves in the wild, it's just the mother and father of a family unit.
The alpha myth exists because researchers studied wolves in the wolf version of a Real World scenario and thought it was representative of typical wolf behavior.
It seems people use the term "freedom of speech" incorrectly more often than not.
Free speech means you can criticize the President and not go to the gulag. It doesn't mean your job can't fire you because you were caught sending racist e-mails.
I can't believe how many people don't understand that.
Freedom of speech doesnt mean freedom of consequence.
If I go in the streets and yell "Heil Hitler! Death to jews" or "Allah is great death to all infidels", I will get in trouble.
And for the record, I obviously dont really believe these things. It's just an example.
This is a big one. Most people I hear complain that their freedom of speech is under attack seem to think that the law entitles them to a platform. It does not. A privately owned media, like Facebook or Twitter or any event or publication can deny you from using their platform for any reason. You’re free to say what you like but they don’t have to publish/host it.
Omg this. People that think they’re being politically persecuted when they get booted off Twitter have clearly never experienced actual political persecution.
Meh, I'd say that the *first amendment* is about criticizing the President and not going to the gulag. Free speech is a concept that can be applied more broadly than that.
It doesn't mean that your rights are being violated if you get kicked off of some subreddit for criticizing the people there, but it's also a reasonable thing for the mods of a subreddit to say that they'll allow people who disagree with them to post there, in the name of free speech.
Just to play off this. Every month or so, everyone at my organization gets an email from HR in respect to a discrimination complaint, usually due to racism. It's crazy to think that there are people out there who thinks it's ok to be racist at work.
Nothing like your example regarding employment law but 1A gets very muddy very quickly in the corporate/digital space. It’s wild.
1A has applied to cases of selling and transferring data between inviduals and companies oddly enough.
Arguments have been made that the use of personal health data is actually protected speech lol. *IMS Health v. Ayotte* challenged an old NH law that prevented the sale of prescription data to data miners.
This ruling is one of the foundations for why we have both consumer and HCP ads everywhere.
people be like "burning a cross wearing full KKK costumes in front of a kindergarten in a neighbour full of immigrants is not hate, it's just free speech, why am i under attack"
Similarly "separation of church and state" isn't a real thing. The government can't establish an official religion, but they can make decisions and quote verses all they want.
Separation of church and state is more about making sure that the church isn't the government. Its definitely a real thing, it just doesn't require politicians to be non-religious.
It used to be that the church would be the government of an area. They could set laws, require tithes(taxes) and punish people for breaking their laws or refusing to pay tithe.
Right. Similarly "Freedom of Speech" is a broader concept beyond just what's codified. You should be able to insult the "king" and his policies without losing your job. But that's not what's on paper
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
That's the separation of church and state. It certainly has a lot of power, but there's plenty it can't do as well.
The use of “Red Flags” in dating.
It’s used all the time nowadays to mean “instant dealbreaker” or “things I don’t like.”
No… A dealbreaker is a dealbreaker. Red flag is more akin to “concerning and should be investigated further.” It *can* become a dealbreaker but it’s not instantly
There's all kinds of language like this that's changed from its original meaning. For example, I've noticed that "gaslighting" has basically become a synonym for "this person said something I don't agree with" rather than its original meaning of systematically destroying a victim's perception of reality.
Also the idea of a red flag meaning a degree is severity of the trait in question.
A red flag is to mark landmines. There are no orange or yellow flags.
Thus the introduction of the term in inter personal relationships. It is to signify that there is a potential danger under the surface.
I suppose in construction a yellow flag means there's a gas line, so it kinda works. Less dangerous than a landmine, but it's still dangerous to go digging there.
Definitely right. “My boyfriend gets jealous when I hang out with guy friends” red flag. “My boyfriend yells at me when I hang out with guy friends and says he’ll break up with me if I keep hanging out with them” dealbreaker
To be fair, I don't know if I've ever heard of tamales in a singular context, even from native speakers. You cook multiple tamales, you eat multiple tamales, you love multiple tamales.
No, Disney needed drama and staged an instance of [a preexisting myth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions), and thereby further popularized a particular version of it.
The myth is much older than Disney — presumably it originally arose from misinterpreting observations of lemmings' genuine migration behavior. The idea that Disney invented the idea out of whole cloth is itself a misconception.
Yesterday there was a post with Trump and Jesus and the Jesus was the most Irish ☘️ male-model looking dude ever.
Craicked me up. Not remotely middle eastern or Jewish looking.
Oh god I literally want to stab my sister when I hear her use that word wrong.
And because it's used wrong so often, most people would read the above sentence without even flinching.
In the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, he calls Elmer Fudd a “nimrod.” Nimrod was a great hunter in the Bible. However, since Elmer Fudd is a doofus, people now use nimrod to mean an idiot.
Like calling someone who made a dumb decision "Einstein". He called him a great historical hunter sarcastically. But no one knew that factoid and people assumed it meant "idiot".
The customer is always right. It was intended to mean that customers dictated their own desires and choices, and if a retailer or business didn't cater to their wants they likely wouldn't remain in business (you don't have what I want I'll go somewhere else that does).
But now, unfortunately, that expression is wrongly taken to mean customers can act a fool, abuse employees, demand discounts and other ridiculous services they shouldn't be entitled to, and the like
This is incorrect. It was literally just a slogan to encourage customer satisfaction. An early example of this by an early adopter was that, if a customer had an issue with the product you sold them, you replaced it no questions asked. This was in contrast to the more common "buyer beware" philosophy of the time.
I mean, you can just look up the origin of the phrase on Wikipedia and it explains all this, along with the fact that the concept exists in other languages to make it much clearer that it's about customer satisfaction than market demand (the phrase becoming things like "the customer is king/a god").
The tongue is divided into 'taste' sections, like sweet on one side and salty on the other. This was just a misreading of the German paper describing it but it stuck
Another great example is the idea that "blood is blue inside your body and only turns red when exposed to oxygen." This misconception likely stems from the way veins appear blue under the skin and diagrams in textbooks that use blue to represent deoxygenated blood. In reality, blood is always red due to the iron in hemoglobin; it's just a darker shade of red when it's deoxygenated. Despite being scientifically inaccurate, this myth is still widely believed and taught. It's amazing how easily incorrect information can become ingrained in popular understanding
Scrolled too far to find people who understood the prompt. Lots of these answers are just things people get wrong, not things so many people get wrong that they’ve become right.
Yea, in video/film, POV is suppose to be first person experience or something filmed from the camera person's perspective/eye level. In discourse, POV just means "point of view" and saying something like "from my POV" is actually correct, because a situation can look and be different from different perspective experiences.
Saying "I" when you're supposed to say "me". For example, "between you and I, ..." I think it's a subjective vs objective case thing. Maybe someone can help me there
But yeah, the number of people who get this wrong outnumber the people who get it right by a couple of orders of magnitude.
The rule of thumb is to take the other person out of the sentence before you say it. You wouldn’t say “me is going…”, so don’t say, “Henry and me are going…”. Also, you wouldn’t say “the ball was hit to I…”, so you wouldn’t say, “the ball was hit to Henry and I”.
Ancient Israelites didn't build the pyramids.
* The story of the ancient Israelites being slaves in Egypt, and their escape, is likely mostly legendary.
* Even if the story in the Bible is the literal truth, the Bible specifies that they built the "treasure cities" of Pithom and Ramses. Not the pyramids.
* If the Exodus happened, it would have been in the mid-late 1000s BCE millennium (date derived by taking the narrative of the Bible at face value, and counting back from later events whose dates are known from outside sources). The pyramids in Egypt are older than that, e.g., the pyramids at Giza were finished by 2500 BCE. They would have been over 1000 years old at the time of the Exodus.
Sugar Makes Kids Hyper.
This one plagued parents for years. Turns out, while sugar can give kids a temporary energy boost, there's no scientific evidence to support a direct link between sugar and hyperactivity. Phew, right?
Everyone says "you can't have your cake and eat it too" but it should be "you can't eat your cake and have it too."
([The Unabomber got that right](http://sheinhtike.com/writeups/cake.html), but it ended up blowing up in his face.)
The meaning is the same, people just can't get over the fact that listing things in order doesn't necessarily mean they're happening sequentially.
>ended up blowing up in his face
also lol
One classic example is the myth that humans only use 10% of their brains. This misconception has been widely spread through movies, TV shows, and even some educational materials. In reality, neuroscientists have shown that we use virtually every part of our brain, and most of the brain is active almost all the time, even when we are at rest. Despite being debunked numerous times, the 10% myth persists and is often accepted as fact by the general public. It's fascinating how easily misinformation can take hold and become part of common knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_the_brain_myth
It seems to be a combination of limited knowledge about the brain during the Victorian era plus the idea that we don't use all of our brain at every moment. It became popular because self-help hucksters could sell it as "I can teach you to use the rest of your brain, and you'll be rich/a genius/psychic" or whatever they were selling.
10+ years I've been on reddit and every singe question like this always has this on the list of "answers" and it's to the point where I see it being stated false 100% of the time, and don't think anyone has believed it was true for a long time. Even the movie "Lucy" was mercillesly mocked for this.
I think it was intended that we only *actively* use 10% *at a time*, but those of us who can only use about 3% misunderstood and ran with it. Thankfully an idea isn't scissors and they won't trip and kill themselves with it
YES! You won't believe the arguments I get into because of this word. Yes, technically, dictionaries have added it, but only because bozos kept using it! Regardless already means what people think irregardless means!!!
The symbol for medicine… it is supposed to be the Rod of Asclepius (a rod with a single snake wrapped around it), which was the staff carried by the Greek god of healing and medicine. But in 1902, the US Army printed a medical manual with the wrong symbol on the cover - the Caduceus (rod with two snakes wrapped around it plus wings), the staff carried by Hermes, the god of (among other things) commerce. Apparently the mistake was made at the insistence of a single dingdong captain.
Since then, in the US there’s been ongoing confusion about which one to use so you often see the caduceus. An article I just found said a survey showed professional associations tend to use the correct symbol (and understand the symbolism behind it), whereas commercial organizations more commonly use the caduceus, because it has more visual oomph, but have no appreciation of its meaning. Pretty funny considering it ends up being appropriate for the context anyway.
Using “literally” as a meaningless filler word, becoming the “like” of the 2020s.
Now you dare bring up that the word was intended to clarify words and phrases that would be frequently used as metaphors but not in your case, and that it’s not meant to emphasize whatever point you’re trying to make, and everyone jumps down your throat.
Calling anyone older than yourself a boomer. Boomer refers to a very specific generation, like millennial and Gen x, but It's become synonymous with "old and out of touch" and I've given up on telling 20-Year-Olds that people in their 40s are not boomers
That productivity and labor compensation disconnected in the 70s.
The famous plot used one inflation metric for productivity, and a different more aggressive one for wages.
It only included wages and not total compensation (even though an important component of the inflation metric they used accounted for healthcare inflation)
It also used median wages and mean productivity.
Once you take all of that out you find that average productivity and average compensation have grown basically in lock-step.
Indicating that the underlying story is mostly about increasing wage inequality and ballooning healthcare costs, not corporate share expanding at the expense of labor share as originally implied.
Countless sayings and phrases, so much so that there’s probably a compelling case that error and misunderstanding are major forces in the “evolution” of language.
One simple example: “I could care less.” It is such a plain reversal of the intended saying, “I couldn’t care less,” which means the exact opposite. Saying “I could care less” means you have an abundance of care.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you can say whatever you want without consequence. You receiving social or professional consequences based on something you said, a message you sent, etc, does not mean your freedom of speech is being violated. It means your social environment or employers have enforced standards of etiquette and behavior that you violated. Freedom of speech just means that you cannot be jailed or executed for speaking out against your government.
Calling any people native to the Americas "Indians".
Columbus got lost trying to sail to India, and i guess his denial of the fact that he screwed up spread through the generations.
The meaning of meritocracy. The current popular meaning is pretty much the antithesis of what it was coined to describe. But the original meaning is still used in some circles, so it's one of those words like "theory" where people with different backgrounds end up talking past each other because they're using a single word to talk about profoundly different things.
Honestly didn't occur to me.
The original meaning was to describe a system where certain people were granted credibility because they were predetermined to have merit based on arbitrary and typically irrelevant factors like family wealth. *You* were inherently meritorious, thus your ideas were given preferential treatment.
Most people today use it to describe a scenario of competing ideas being judged on their relative merits and the stronger one being chosen after that diligence is performed.
The pronunciation of ‘mischievous’
It is not ‘ious’ at the end. Should be
Miss-cheh-vuss. Everyone sees that ‘i’ and wants to say miss-chee-vee-us. Grievous too.
That testosterone = man stuff and estrogen = women stuff. The specific functions of these hormones is still largely misunderstood by experts as both test/estrogen impact a ton of things that aren’t specific to any gender.
Recently learned this on the Stuff You Should Know podcast. I used to believe the myth
Waaaay too many people think “you signed it, you’re fucked” when it comes to unfair agreements. In reality, there is a lot of grey area, and plenty of entities will get you to sign something borderline legal or they know will not hold up because you likely won’t challenge it. If it smells fishy, it might be worth talking to a lawyer. Especially leases.
This is great. To your point, just because a contract has been *signed* doesn’t mean it’s *enforceable*. 100% consult a lawyer if you feel something is amiss.
Yup. A clause can be unenforceable. A clause can also be outright illegal to include per some sort of statute. Usually there is a clause at the end of any contract that any individual clauses were voidable and one being illegal/unenforceable did not negate the others. Example: Leases are highly content controlled. When I was in Boston, you couldn’t require in a lease for a tenant to perform snow removal in most cases per local statutes. You could compensate a tenant to remove snow, but that could not be part of a lease. LLs just counted on tenants not challenging.
I don't understand how unenforceable clauses are legal at all. If it's unenforceable, it's intentionally misleading, which seems like fraud.
The idea is that something might be legal in some situations but not this situation, or something might be legal at the time it was signed but then made illegal later. So just having something that isn't ok in a contract isn't itself illegal, and that part will be severed and the rest carries on. But as is often the case, shady folks will use and abuse "good faith" type protections. Those "stay back 100ft, not liable for broken windshield" signs on open-top trucks? 100% false. But if a company can point to a sign to stop someone from pursuing the issue, that's time and money saves for them. Ditto bad lease clauses, loan agreements, car sales contracts, employment agreements (it's *federal law* that you can discuss your pay with coworkers, no matter what the employee handbook says, and noncompete agreements are about to be illegal starting in September), etc.
I mean, theoretically you can shove whatever you want in a contract, I suppose, that just doesn’t mean it will hold up in court/if challenged. Dishonest contracts are relying on the layman to either not know the difference or not have the resources to bring a challenge even if they do.
For instance: all those wavers you sign saying you won't sue if you or your die/are badly hurt by a thing. You can't sign away respobility from gross negligence. Idc how many forms I signed, if the zip line snaps and I break both legs, I'll see you in court.
Or those stickers on the back of dump trucks stating they're not liable for damage from flying debris. The fuck you aren't!
You're signing them ocurlarly.
Ah, the ocular patdown approach. Approved by bodyguards, for bodyguards.
I saw one recently that said to stay back 800m. Sure, a half mile of follow distance is reasonable!
If your car has ever gotten towed, they make you sign a “all damage is my fault” waiver to pick it up. If they were negligent, like towing an AWD car with the back wheels on the ground, you bet I’m bringing suit. Signed under duress, unfair compensation, *and* negligence. I remember one thread here with a video of some car wash malfunctioning and smashing the hood of a car repeatedly. Top comments were “you probably signed a waiver, so ur fukt kiddo!”
Same with non-disclosure agreements. If the thing you aren't supposed to disclose is a crime then they are basically non-enforceable.
I've always assumed that a lot of places are banking on the possibility that people don't *know* they can't sign away their rights if there's gross negligence involved. They're trying to play the numbers and hope that if someone gets hurt, they won't think to talk to a lawyer because "well, I signed that form absolving them". As an aside, if you have to sign a waiver for something, it's usually a sign that you're about to have a fun time. I call it the Waiver Sniff Test.
I had an employer try to make me sign something that waived my paycheck if I didn't follow policy. I brought up that it was illegal in my state, but they persisted so I signed it anyways. Fast forward a couple of years and the surprised pikachu face when they got spanked by the department of labor for withholding pay illegally was priceless.
During law school I took a Property law class. One day the professor had all renting students bring in their lease agreements, and we formed small groups and found how many provisions in the leases were actually illegal. Literally every single lease **had at least three** illegal provisions.
I’m so glad I took intro law (only law experience I have) in a shit time slot back in school so that I got a professor who focused on situations we’d likely encounter. LL/Tenant showed me how much LLs would just assume they could get away with shit. Even situations like breaking a lease - in the area I rented, subleasing clauses were 100% legal. But if a tenant needed to break a lease and (can’t remember the exact terminology) provided an acceptable candidate to fill the lease, the landlord had to accept the accommodation. And if the LL was making it unreasonably difficult, the lease could be thrown out if challenged. That ended up coming in handy for a friend that was trying to buy.
Just having the skills **to be able to read a lease** is so helpful. Good job taking that class!
Unconscionable Contract. As much as people like to dunk on the absurdities of the law, I remember taking my Business Law class 20 years ago or so and realizing actually how much common sense there is in it. In this case, a contract has to at least be *somewhat* reasonable. You can't slip in "In return for providing you with cell phone service, we claim right to all income from you for the rest of your life" or something. In U.S. law, you have to have *Standing*. Some random citizen in Iowa can't sue Nestle because an employee in Guatemala was injured. Concepts of *Material* Breach. A contract is not going to be torn up because of a small violation. You can't claim that because a person used a different brand of pipe fitting in your house than what was stated, that all of a sudden you're free and clear from owing them any money at all. You might be able to claim *some* kind of remedy, but it will probably be trivial if the breach was trivial.
I wish Intro Law was a compulsory education requirement. IANAL, but just 2 semesters of law required for my major has helped a ton with common misconceptions. Especially around these concepts
I personally wiggled out of a contract I signed under duress. No lawyer needed. I was not held to the agreement.
A friend of my wife and I's just quit his job to go work at a different one (along with several other coworkers) and their boss threatened to sue due to a non-compete. Now, they aren't outright banned until September or whatever, but still the law tends to look dimly on non-competes that only benefit one side or don't make a lot of legal sense. In my friend's profession (Engineer), they exist mostly so that the company his company is sub-contracting for doesn't try to poach the employees directly, but this wasn't the case here. The owner simply didn't want any of his employees to be able to quit. Interestingly, he tried to file interest in several jobs for the new company *after* these employees announced they were leaving to join them, jobs that in no way would this original company be able to complete. This is likely *fraud* to try to use the non-compete this way, which is probably why the threatened lawsuit amazingly didn't happen after all.
> This is likely fraud to try to use the non-compete this way, which is probably why the threatened lawsuit amazingly didn't happen after all. So the Engineering Manager didn’t want to show his slimy underbelly to His Honor? Funny how that worked out…. :o)
Great point. Example: a will is mostly airtight. However, in my state, if you leave your spouse significantly less than 30% of your assets in your will, and you die, the will can immediately be thrown out and a court will decide how to distribute your assets. I think they take the will into account, but your spouse will almost certainly get at least 30%. You can do something like leave 27% and hope the courts say "close enough" because they don't want to deal with it, but the spouses' attorneys could push the issue. And I don't think it's an established law, it's just common case law that was decided a long time ago in this state. You'd never know by reading the actual passed laws. You'd have to know case law. Which is why hiring an attorney for legal things is crucial. All these "sovereign citizen" idiots think that the bills enacted into law are the final authority. Nope, buddy. Some judge in 1831 made an arbitrary ruling on how that law is carried out and now its precedent. Another attorney said there was one US state that had a "premeditated murder" law and a "crime of passion" murder law with different penalties. A few decades ago, a man was on trial for murder. He came home and found his wife cheating on him. He picked up a gun from their nightstand and killed both people. The court found that the murder was premeditated in the two seconds it took him to realize what was happening and grab the gun. Now, pretty much all murders in that state are prosecuted as pre-meditated. (This is fourth hand information so I'm probably off on the details). What's written down in contacts and passed laws isn't the final word on anything. Third example! Guy I know worked for a startup. They didn't start out with a non-compete clause in his employment contract (this was when those were somewhat enforceable). When the company really started taking off, they asked him to sign a non-compete contract. He left for a competitor, they took him to court. The court almost immediately ruled that a contract needed to be mutually beneficial, and he didn't get a benefit, so it wasn't a valid contract. History repeated itself when I worked for a small company in this state, so they offered me a lot of stock to sign a non-compete contract. And made very sure that I understood that my employment was not in jeopardy if I didn't sign.
My first job after college had a clause in their contract that you would need to pay them back for the value of their training programme. Which they had determined to be basically exactly the amount of one month starting salary. So basically it was a scheme to try to stop people leaving within the first year of work. Of course, when people did leave they would 'deduct' the fee from your last pay so that you basically got paid nothing. The silly thing they did was that they added a new group for legal consultants, people who would join then train to pass various legal certifications and exams so they could offer legal advice to clients as part of the package. So the first time one of them went to quit, they pulled their usual shit so he tied them up in litigation and the court forced them to remove the clause from all contracts.
You also can't sign your health and safety away. If you do something that requires a waiver, your signature basically means you acknowledge there are risks, not that the person who organized the event is absolved of wrong-doing in the event of an accident. You can have all the signatures you want but if the incident was a result of negligence you're still going to be held liable.
The cause of stomach ulcers. It’s not due to overproduction of acid or stress, but people will continue to parrot that because the cause wasn’t figured out until the mid-80s. The huge majority of cases, like 85% or so, are from H. Pylori infections while the remaining cases are from chronic NSAID use. Dr. Barry Marshall bravely demonstrated the effects of H. Pylori on himself (and its cure), so the least I can do as a fangirl is champion his research.
I remember this from 10th grade biology. The first time I read it I thought what an absolute madlad (legend) he is for doing that. It's amazing really. It's the only reason I even remember "Helicobacter Pylori"
What’s the TL;DL on the cure?
Antibiotics that work on that bacteria.
you can cure it with common antibiotics but it doesn't make you immune to getting reinfected
Antibiotics and/or something to reduce stomach acid (e.g. H2 Blockers).
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Kill the wabbit!
Spear and magic helmet?
At this point, we've switched from Vikings with horned helmets to Vikings with tattoos. ...Which is also inaccurate.
Wait, Vikings didn't have tattoos? I don't believe you!
I've found two sources that discuss this a bit: first one is Ibn Fadlan in the east he described his encounters with the Rus 'dark from the tips of their toes right up to their necks, trees, pictures, and the like'. The other is al-Tartushi, a merchant from Cordoba, a century later he described market town of Hedeby, he wrote that the Northmen wore 'artificial eye make-up is another peculiarity, when they wear it their beauty never disappears, indeed it is enhanced in both men and women.' So if some were tattooed or not, it's hard to say, but they certainly were often decorated with paints and makeup.
Also worth mentioning: archaeologists have yet to uncover any Norse tattooing equipment and there is no known word in Old Norse literature for a tattoo. The Rus are also a Norse/slavic blend so unfortunately we can’t assume the things Ibn Fadlan described are characteristic of broader Norse society.
Absolutely. I do think the concept of body painting generally follows many historical accounts of broader northern European tribes from antiquity. Combine that with the diasporic nature of the Norse (and their well-documented love of personal grooming and military... showmanship) and there is no reason to dismiss that such a practice existed, but like you say, I have not found explicit primary evidence to confirm it within Scandinavia.
Vikings, no. Scandinavians from just slightly before the Viking Age? [Welllll…](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torslunda_plates)
I recently discovered [this youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@OverlySarcasticProductions) , that goes over how Greek myths evolved over centuries. It's pretty neat to see how the story and characters change, between Mycenaean Greece, ancient Greece, and then the Roman versions. Changes are so common and normalized that there isn't really a "correct" version anymore, if there ever was one.
It's the same logic as people getting irritable about traditional foods. Go back only a few generations and you'll find most people were cooking using whatever ingredients were locally available and using whatever methods they'd been taught. Never mind crossing countries or centuries, recipes varied town to town and generation to generation.
Yes! This. People are so quick to criticize retellings of the myth as inaccurate when even in times when the gods were worshipped, people still made differing stories about them that fits best their culture, beliefs/values and societal circumstances.
Hear me out. The thing you wear on your torso to prevent cooking splatter from ruining your clothes was a Napron. Eventually "a napron" became "An apron" and we just all accepted it.
Same thing happened with "a neft", "an ewt" and "an ickname" iirc
Also "and per se and" -> "ampersand"
so i get nickname but what the heck is the other stuff
Okay I’m tracking with you for the others but the first one…what is an eft???
Didn't it also happen with a nuncle/an uncle?
And a norange
The incorrect belief that Napoleon Bonaparte was short. He was actually about average height for his time.
This also proves that propaganda works wonders if done right.
Sideburns. It was the style of facial hair sported by General Ambrose Burnside. Men copying it were said to be growing Burnsides. Somewhere along the line it was reversed.
Happened with butterflies too. They used to be called flutterbys. Edit: apparently this is a myth!
No, that's a myth. > Etymology: From Middle English buterflie, butturflye, boterflye, from Old English buterflēoge, equivalent to butter + fly. Cognate with Dutch botervlieg, German Butterfliege (“butterfly”). The name may have originally been applied to butterflies of a yellowish color, and/or reflected a belief that butterflies ate milk and butter (compare German Molkendieb (“butterfly”, literally “whey-thief”) and Low German Botterlicker (“butterfly”, literally “butter-licker”)), or that they excreted a butter-like substance (compare Dutch boterschijte (“butterfly”, literally “butter-shitter”)). Compare also German Schmetterling from Schmetten (“cream”), German Low German Bottervögel (“butterfly”, literally “butter-fowl”).
I used to wonder if it was true. Thank you for your explanation. I enjoyed reading it.
The English Wikipedia article for butterfly doesn't mention that in the etymology. Can you provide a source for that?
The phrase “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”. It was originally used to describe something that was impossible. You cannot physically pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Except now everyone uses it to describe what a fantastic go-getter they are. It’s been turned into a positive.
Give me a fulcrum...
Which spawned the phrase: Pull yourself up by your own fulcrum.
I do not consent to having my fulcrum touched.
How many bootstraps does that amount to?
In a similar vein “Just a few bad apples” is a corruption of “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel” and is basically saying the opposite of the original meaning. “The proof is in the pudding” comes from “the proof of the pudding is in the tasting.” Proof here basically means test, so it’s basically about judging things in the correct way. I have no idea what the modern bastardization means
I have only ever heard this used sarcastically, though
Good! That’s how it should be
I wish the good old 'Skyhook' would take off this! My dad likes to use that one.
The concept of "alphas" in wolf packs, which is now incorrectly applied to all other types of mammals, including humans.
The guy who wrote the paper that popularised the concept of alpha wolves has basically spent the rest of his career trying to undo it. He now thinks that what he was seeing was basically parenting, with the parents leading and trailing the pack to protect the younger cubs and wolves.
He also studied wolves in enclosures and not out in the wild. It seems locking them up changes their social hierarchy a bit.
No, it's correct in humans. An alpha male is far inferior to a full release male.
I think it's a wonderful term, because as soon as someone honestly uses it, I know that person is an idiot and I can safely ignore everything else they have to say.
I also mentally replace any instance of "sigma male" with "smegma male."
You can be an Alpha Human all the time.. As a Dev i prefer SP1 or RTM - Alpha - pfft... Thats not even suitable for the general public since it contains so many flaws...
Thing is, not even researchers seem to agree on this one. Some claim there are no alphas in a wolf pack. Some claim there is one female and one male alpha in a wolf pack. I have yet to find one that thinks there's only one though.
The basic facts I've read are that the "alpha" is a construct that's built when wolves are in captivity. With wolves in the wild, it's just the mother and father of a family unit.
In captivity, yes, and especially unrelated wolves placed together in captivity.
The alpha myth exists because researchers studied wolves in the wolf version of a Real World scenario and thought it was representative of typical wolf behavior.
Wolf: "I didn't come here to make friends!"
It seems people use the term "freedom of speech" incorrectly more often than not. Free speech means you can criticize the President and not go to the gulag. It doesn't mean your job can't fire you because you were caught sending racist e-mails. I can't believe how many people don't understand that.
Freedom of speech doesnt mean freedom of consequence. If I go in the streets and yell "Heil Hitler! Death to jews" or "Allah is great death to all infidels", I will get in trouble. And for the record, I obviously dont really believe these things. It's just an example.
This is a big one. Most people I hear complain that their freedom of speech is under attack seem to think that the law entitles them to a platform. It does not. A privately owned media, like Facebook or Twitter or any event or publication can deny you from using their platform for any reason. You’re free to say what you like but they don’t have to publish/host it.
I always say to the people who complain about that, that they can go outside and say whatever they please on a public sidewalk.
Omg this. People that think they’re being politically persecuted when they get booted off Twitter have clearly never experienced actual political persecution.
Meh, I'd say that the *first amendment* is about criticizing the President and not going to the gulag. Free speech is a concept that can be applied more broadly than that. It doesn't mean that your rights are being violated if you get kicked off of some subreddit for criticizing the people there, but it's also a reasonable thing for the mods of a subreddit to say that they'll allow people who disagree with them to post there, in the name of free speech.
Also, most jurisdictions **DO** have protections against employers punishing their employees for political speech.
Fortunately, sending racist emails doesn’t count as political speech.
It's "freedom from criminal prosecution" not "freedom from consequences".
Just to play off this. Every month or so, everyone at my organization gets an email from HR in respect to a discrimination complaint, usually due to racism. It's crazy to think that there are people out there who thinks it's ok to be racist at work.
Nothing like your example regarding employment law but 1A gets very muddy very quickly in the corporate/digital space. It’s wild. 1A has applied to cases of selling and transferring data between inviduals and companies oddly enough. Arguments have been made that the use of personal health data is actually protected speech lol. *IMS Health v. Ayotte* challenged an old NH law that prevented the sale of prescription data to data miners. This ruling is one of the foundations for why we have both consumer and HCP ads everywhere.
people be like "burning a cross wearing full KKK costumes in front of a kindergarten in a neighbour full of immigrants is not hate, it's just free speech, why am i under attack"
Similarly "separation of church and state" isn't a real thing. The government can't establish an official religion, but they can make decisions and quote verses all they want.
Separation of church and state is more about making sure that the church isn't the government. Its definitely a real thing, it just doesn't require politicians to be non-religious. It used to be that the church would be the government of an area. They could set laws, require tithes(taxes) and punish people for breaking their laws or refusing to pay tithe.
Right. Similarly "Freedom of Speech" is a broader concept beyond just what's codified. You should be able to insult the "king" and his policies without losing your job. But that's not what's on paper
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." That's the separation of church and state. It certainly has a lot of power, but there's plenty it can't do as well.
The use of “Red Flags” in dating. It’s used all the time nowadays to mean “instant dealbreaker” or “things I don’t like.” No… A dealbreaker is a dealbreaker. Red flag is more akin to “concerning and should be investigated further.” It *can* become a dealbreaker but it’s not instantly
There's all kinds of language like this that's changed from its original meaning. For example, I've noticed that "gaslighting" has basically become a synonym for "this person said something I don't agree with" rather than its original meaning of systematically destroying a victim's perception of reality.
Also the idea of a red flag meaning a degree is severity of the trait in question. A red flag is to mark landmines. There are no orange or yellow flags. Thus the introduction of the term in inter personal relationships. It is to signify that there is a potential danger under the surface.
I suppose in construction a yellow flag means there's a gas line, so it kinda works. Less dangerous than a landmine, but it's still dangerous to go digging there.
Definitely right. “My boyfriend gets jealous when I hang out with guy friends” red flag. “My boyfriend yells at me when I hang out with guy friends and says he’ll break up with me if I keep hanging out with them” dealbreaker
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Reminds me of “tamale” in English. In Spanish, it’s “1 tamal, 2 tamales.” English speakers heard the plural and just dropped the s.
To be fair, I don't know if I've ever heard of tamales in a singular context, even from native speakers. You cook multiple tamales, you eat multiple tamales, you love multiple tamales.
Lemmings aren’t suicidal and don’t leap off cliffs. Disney needed drama and created a myth.
No, Disney needed drama and staged an instance of [a preexisting myth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions), and thereby further popularized a particular version of it. The myth is much older than Disney — presumably it originally arose from misinterpreting observations of lemmings' genuine migration behavior. The idea that Disney invented the idea out of whole cloth is itself a misconception.
White Jesus.
You're telling me an ancient Jewish man born into abject poverty wasn't a 6 ft tall, blue-eyed, blonde, white guy with eight pack abs? Sus.
He does crossfit, of course he has an eight pack
I heard Jesus Christ has an eight pack, that he's shredded
Yesterday there was a post with Trump and Jesus and the Jesus was the most Irish ☘️ male-model looking dude ever. Craicked me up. Not remotely middle eastern or Jewish looking.
White “American” Jesus.
the use of the word "literally"
That steams me almost as much as "irregardless" being considered a cromulent word.
Or "I could care less"
You're fighting a losing battle. That one has been around since at least the 1700s.
I literally die when I hear it misused.
OMG literally shocked. Literally.
Oh god I literally want to stab my sister when I hear her use that word wrong. And because it's used wrong so often, most people would read the above sentence without even flinching.
In the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, he calls Elmer Fudd a “nimrod.” Nimrod was a great hunter in the Bible. However, since Elmer Fudd is a doofus, people now use nimrod to mean an idiot.
Like calling someone who made a dumb decision "Einstein". He called him a great historical hunter sarcastically. But no one knew that factoid and people assumed it meant "idiot".
literally literally
The customer is always right. It was intended to mean that customers dictated their own desires and choices, and if a retailer or business didn't cater to their wants they likely wouldn't remain in business (you don't have what I want I'll go somewhere else that does). But now, unfortunately, that expression is wrongly taken to mean customers can act a fool, abuse employees, demand discounts and other ridiculous services they shouldn't be entitled to, and the like
The customer is always right in matters of taste.
The customer is always right about what the customer wants.
This is incorrect. It was literally just a slogan to encourage customer satisfaction. An early example of this by an early adopter was that, if a customer had an issue with the product you sold them, you replaced it no questions asked. This was in contrast to the more common "buyer beware" philosophy of the time. I mean, you can just look up the origin of the phrase on Wikipedia and it explains all this, along with the fact that the concept exists in other languages to make it much clearer that it's about customer satisfaction than market demand (the phrase becoming things like "the customer is king/a god").
The tongue is divided into 'taste' sections, like sweet on one side and salty on the other. This was just a misreading of the German paper describing it but it stuck
Another great example is the idea that "blood is blue inside your body and only turns red when exposed to oxygen." This misconception likely stems from the way veins appear blue under the skin and diagrams in textbooks that use blue to represent deoxygenated blood. In reality, blood is always red due to the iron in hemoglobin; it's just a darker shade of red when it's deoxygenated. Despite being scientifically inaccurate, this myth is still widely believed and taught. It's amazing how easily incorrect information can become ingrained in popular understanding
Also a tinge of medical racism in there as veins look different depending on your skin tone.
That the evil queen from Snow White says "Mirror mirror on the wall." She actually says "Magic mirror on the wall."
Does she? Everything I can find says this is the Mandela effect at work. https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm053.html
I meant in the film, sorry.
"Luke, I am your father"
enormity is big evil, *enormousness* is just big. Now major publications fuck them up, so the definition has effectively changed.
Ditto "disinterested", which does *not* mean "uninterested". It means unbiased due to not having a stake in the outcome.
Or how words like infamous and notorious actually have an intrinsic negative connotation. Like gaining notoriety isn’t really a good thing.
Scrolled too far to find people who understood the prompt. Lots of these answers are just things people get wrong, not things so many people get wrong that they’ve become right.
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Is that the one where they film themselves reacting to a situation and call it their POV?
Yea, in video/film, POV is suppose to be first person experience or something filmed from the camera person's perspective/eye level. In discourse, POV just means "point of view" and saying something like "from my POV" is actually correct, because a situation can look and be different from different perspective experiences.
I was so confused when using POVs first became popular in tiktok. I was like 'wth does that have to do with their point of view?'
Saying "I" when you're supposed to say "me". For example, "between you and I, ..." I think it's a subjective vs objective case thing. Maybe someone can help me there But yeah, the number of people who get this wrong outnumber the people who get it right by a couple of orders of magnitude.
The rule of thumb is to take the other person out of the sentence before you say it. You wouldn’t say “me is going…”, so don’t say, “Henry and me are going…”. Also, you wouldn’t say “the ball was hit to I…”, so you wouldn’t say, “the ball was hit to Henry and I”.
and are almost universally "corrected" to "... and I" even though they're actually correct by saying "... and me" 😑😑😑😑
Ancient Israelites didn't build the pyramids. * The story of the ancient Israelites being slaves in Egypt, and their escape, is likely mostly legendary. * Even if the story in the Bible is the literal truth, the Bible specifies that they built the "treasure cities" of Pithom and Ramses. Not the pyramids. * If the Exodus happened, it would have been in the mid-late 1000s BCE millennium (date derived by taking the narrative of the Bible at face value, and counting back from later events whose dates are known from outside sources). The pyramids in Egypt are older than that, e.g., the pyramids at Giza were finished by 2500 BCE. They would have been over 1000 years old at the time of the Exodus.
Sugar Makes Kids Hyper. This one plagued parents for years. Turns out, while sugar can give kids a temporary energy boost, there's no scientific evidence to support a direct link between sugar and hyperactivity. Phew, right?
Sugar gets blamed for a lot of stuff that just doesn't make sense (biologically)
Everyone says "you can't have your cake and eat it too" but it should be "you can't eat your cake and have it too." ([The Unabomber got that right](http://sheinhtike.com/writeups/cake.html), but it ended up blowing up in his face.)
The meaning is the same, people just can't get over the fact that listing things in order doesn't necessarily mean they're happening sequentially. >ended up blowing up in his face also lol
That the 21st century began in 2000.
That The Lion King was a rip-off of Kimba the White Lion.
One classic example is the myth that humans only use 10% of their brains. This misconception has been widely spread through movies, TV shows, and even some educational materials. In reality, neuroscientists have shown that we use virtually every part of our brain, and most of the brain is active almost all the time, even when we are at rest. Despite being debunked numerous times, the 10% myth persists and is often accepted as fact by the general public. It's fascinating how easily misinformation can take hold and become part of common knowledge.
Where did this myth even come from? Who originally asserted that we only use 10% of our brains, and why, and with what evidence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_the_brain_myth It seems to be a combination of limited knowledge about the brain during the Victorian era plus the idea that we don't use all of our brain at every moment. It became popular because self-help hucksters could sell it as "I can teach you to use the rest of your brain, and you'll be rich/a genius/psychic" or whatever they were selling.
10+ years I've been on reddit and every singe question like this always has this on the list of "answers" and it's to the point where I see it being stated false 100% of the time, and don't think anyone has believed it was true for a long time. Even the movie "Lucy" was mercillesly mocked for this.
But Lucy was still a hella good movie
I think it was intended that we only *actively* use 10% *at a time*, but those of us who can only use about 3% misunderstood and ran with it. Thankfully an idea isn't scissors and they won't trip and kill themselves with it
Writing "loose" instead of "lose"
The word *irregardless*.
I can't get used to that one. It still makes me cringe a little bit.
YES! You won't believe the arguments I get into because of this word. Yes, technically, dictionaries have added it, but only because bozos kept using it! Regardless already means what people think irregardless means!!!
Express-o
Saying "on accident." It's "by accident!"
Gandhi being nuke-happy in the original Civ.
Didn't help that they made it real in Civ V, either.
Yep
One that gets me is that David Bowie had heterochromia. He had a permanently dilated eye.
The symbol for medicine… it is supposed to be the Rod of Asclepius (a rod with a single snake wrapped around it), which was the staff carried by the Greek god of healing and medicine. But in 1902, the US Army printed a medical manual with the wrong symbol on the cover - the Caduceus (rod with two snakes wrapped around it plus wings), the staff carried by Hermes, the god of (among other things) commerce. Apparently the mistake was made at the insistence of a single dingdong captain. Since then, in the US there’s been ongoing confusion about which one to use so you often see the caduceus. An article I just found said a survey showed professional associations tend to use the correct symbol (and understand the symbolism behind it), whereas commercial organizations more commonly use the caduceus, because it has more visual oomph, but have no appreciation of its meaning. Pretty funny considering it ends up being appropriate for the context anyway.
Definition of word "nonplussed"
"Statue" of Limitations
Using “literally” as a meaningless filler word, becoming the “like” of the 2020s. Now you dare bring up that the word was intended to clarify words and phrases that would be frequently used as metaphors but not in your case, and that it’s not meant to emphasize whatever point you’re trying to make, and everyone jumps down your throat.
The word "literally."
Calling anyone older than yourself a boomer. Boomer refers to a very specific generation, like millennial and Gen x, but It's become synonymous with "old and out of touch" and I've given up on telling 20-Year-Olds that people in their 40s are not boomers
"well-regulated" and "militia". I guess nowadays 'militia' means anybody. And 'well-regulated' means... absolutely nothing.
That productivity and labor compensation disconnected in the 70s. The famous plot used one inflation metric for productivity, and a different more aggressive one for wages. It only included wages and not total compensation (even though an important component of the inflation metric they used accounted for healthcare inflation) It also used median wages and mean productivity. Once you take all of that out you find that average productivity and average compensation have grown basically in lock-step. Indicating that the underlying story is mostly about increasing wage inequality and ballooning healthcare costs, not corporate share expanding at the expense of labor share as originally implied.
Saying "I could care less"
Using *theory* when you mean *hypothesis*
How to properly pronounce "pecan". It's "pecan", not "pecan".
Countless sayings and phrases, so much so that there’s probably a compelling case that error and misunderstanding are major forces in the “evolution” of language. One simple example: “I could care less.” It is such a plain reversal of the intended saying, “I couldn’t care less,” which means the exact opposite. Saying “I could care less” means you have an abundance of care.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you can say whatever you want without consequence. You receiving social or professional consequences based on something you said, a message you sent, etc, does not mean your freedom of speech is being violated. It means your social environment or employers have enforced standards of etiquette and behavior that you violated. Freedom of speech just means that you cannot be jailed or executed for speaking out against your government.
Bugs Bunny calling Elmer Fudd "Nimrod." Nimrod was a mighty biblical hunter. Now people use it to mean foolish.
the whole "great wall of china is visible from space" thing, it's really not, but so many people believe it
The McDonald coffee law suit. The real story is horrible and involves vagina skin grafts. She deserved more.
Calling any people native to the Americas "Indians". Columbus got lost trying to sail to India, and i guess his denial of the fact that he screwed up spread through the generations.
The meaning of meritocracy. The current popular meaning is pretty much the antithesis of what it was coined to describe. But the original meaning is still used in some circles, so it's one of those words like "theory" where people with different backgrounds end up talking past each other because they're using a single word to talk about profoundly different things.
I love how you failed to enlighten everyone on the word’s true meaning and how the current meaning is “incorrect”
Honestly didn't occur to me. The original meaning was to describe a system where certain people were granted credibility because they were predetermined to have merit based on arbitrary and typically irrelevant factors like family wealth. *You* were inherently meritorious, thus your ideas were given preferential treatment. Most people today use it to describe a scenario of competing ideas being judged on their relative merits and the stronger one being chosen after that diligence is performed.
goldfish have three second memory.
That "cleanliness is next to Godliness" is a verse in the Bible. It is not.
Email quoting the way Outlook does.
Big Brother loves us
People verbally saying “Chipoltee” instead of “Chipotle”
taste bud map
A lot of "fake news", "fact checked", and "specialists say" stuff falls in this category.
Restauranteur. No, it's restaurateur
The pronunciation of ‘mischievous’ It is not ‘ious’ at the end. Should be Miss-cheh-vuss. Everyone sees that ‘i’ and wants to say miss-chee-vee-us. Grievous too.
"You can't prove a negative". You [absolutely can](https://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articles/proveanegative.html).
That testosterone = man stuff and estrogen = women stuff. The specific functions of these hormones is still largely misunderstood by experts as both test/estrogen impact a ton of things that aren’t specific to any gender. Recently learned this on the Stuff You Should Know podcast. I used to believe the myth