“The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
Ha! Not when I was a retail manager. You come in and raise hell demanding this and that I’m likely to tell you to fuck-off and get out of my store. You talk to me like a civilized human and ask politely if there’s any way I can help you and I’ll bend over backwards to make you happy.
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
IME, absence makes the heart soon forget.
Yes. And a big red label: “Warning: Lark’s vomit.”
Speaking of boiled frogs, James Fallows of the Atlantic has been fightingthe good fight against that particular piece of ignorance for years. The Straight Dope should give him a special award or something…
It will all work out in the end
Of course it will, you’ll be dead and won’t care anymore.
Attraction and having lasting relationships are not even close to the same thing, though. The cliche doesn’t say “Opposites live happily ever after.” “Opposites attract” is merely a hormone-driven variation of “the grass is always greener on the other side,” which is to say that people often get turned on by things in other people that are different from what they’re used to.
Oh, honey, it’s too bad you can’t get pregnant. Just adopt a baby. You’ll get pregnant right away! It always happens that way!
I’ve worked with customers and patrons for over 20 years. Whoever came up with this little saying should be boiled alive in a vat of Idi Amin’s orange-smelling piss.
“You can’t cheat an honest man.” Tell that to Elie Wiesel and other victims of Bernie Madoff.
That particular case does give some ring of truth to that saying, although not so universal as “can’t” cheat an honest man. Many of Madoff’s investors (not sure which ones, probably all anonymous) thought that Madoff was getting such high returns by scamming the market, somehow, not realizing it was themselves, instead.
Wrong cliche. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
It’s funny you should mention this, as I just read an article the other day titled “Gene Research Finds Opposites Do Attract.”
The great debate marches on!
“Half the people are below average income/intelligence/height/whatever.” This is usually close to being correct, but it’s doesn’t always hold. One outlier can skew the mean (which is what “average” means in common usage) pretty badly.
“You can’t prove a negative.” Take any class in number theory and you’ll see that it’s possible to prove that there’s no largest prime, and there’s no pair of whole numbers whose ratio equals the square root of 2.
I remember in college one of my philosophy professors once said, “For every cliche, there exists a cliche that is the opposite.”
True?
Great Minds Think Alike…and Fools Seldom Differ
The game Medieval 2: Total War is almost a proof of this. There’s a splash screen that appears occasionally that contains one random quote. Some of them contradict each other (much of the time, one of the offenders is Machiavelli.)
For instance: Do not do everything in your power to your enemy, for you do not know when they might one day be your friend.
vs.
Men should either be treated generously or destroyed, for a hurt man can seek vengeance but a ruined man cannot.
In war, three things are necessary: money, money, and yet more money.
vs.
The sinews of war are not money, but good soldiers.
I vote for “never let the sun go down on your wrath” as relationship advice. I have always found that staying up till 2 am irritably trying to resolve some minor issue is not nearly as helpful as getting a good night’s sleep and waking up in the morning to discover that you are no longer angry and in fact feel like an idiot for having made a mountain out of a molehill.
The squeaky wheel gets replaced.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease vs. the tallest poppy gets mown down
I avoid cliches like the plague.