One of my absolute biggest pet peeves is when people use old idioms that have been bastardized into meaning the exact opposite of what they are actually supposed to mean. I know what you’re thinking and fuck you, get off my lawn.
Why am I ranting about this on a day when two Republican COVID deniers died of COVID and the President decided to write a tweet that amounted to using the Constitution to wipe his ass eating mouth? I’m glad you asked and we’ll get to it eventually. Kind of.
If you’re Facebook friends with me you’ve had to hear me rant about this first one annually when it pops up in my memories because I share it EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR.
The ever popular quote by narcissists everywhere: “Blood is thicker than water.”
NOPE! This is the full text of the quote:
We like to tell ourselves for a wealth of reasons, mostly mental self preservation, that our family will love us no matter what. And more troublesome, we are taught from a very young age that you have to love and forgive your family of all sins.
YOU DO NOT.
In this saying they refer to the bonds of war, the covenant of loyalty in battle. Meaning that the people you choose to fight beside you, to fight FOR you, those people are the ones that matter. Sure, they can be your family, those who crawled out of the womb before of after you, but they don’t HAVE to be. And that is okay.
Ready for the next one?
Great!
I want to preface this by saying that I’m not going to get into all the reasons I’ve seen this saying tossed around for the last few months because you can figure that out and for awhile now I only blog when I’m in a mentally precarious state of mind and I don’t have it in me to embrace the rage right now.
SO!
In tweets, in Facebook comments, on news articles, on the radio, on TV: “Don’t judge based on one bad apple.”
Nope. This is the full text of the quote:
“One bad apple spoils the barrel.“
One bad apple isn’t a big deal till that apple infects all the apples around them and pretty soon you go to make a pie and you realize all the apples are rotten and then you have to make brownies instead. Brownies are better than apply pie anyway. FIGHT ME.
But what annoying idiom is the one that set me off at 5:00AM? The often quoted: “You catch more flies with honey.”
Technically it’s true but first I wanted to include the correct quote because all you assholes are saying it incorrectly.
While the original is technically true, flies do like honey more than vinegar, you know what they like more than vinegar? STEAMING PILES OF SHIT. And corpses.
I have no words of wisdom for this one, you guys. This is supposed to warn you that being nice gets you further in life but also honey is kind of boring. It’s just sweet bee food. There are 11 kinds of vinegar and with them you can cook thousands of dishes and clean and make things sweeter or more sour and you can pickle things and deter ants and condition your hair and even sooth the sting of a stupid honey bee.
So I don’t know, don’t be a dick but also be the vinegar?
ANYWAY, this post was brought to you by a brilliant meme posted by Jenny this morning on Facebook.
And my deteriorating quarantine induced mental health. But that’s another post for another day.