I can’t stand the phrase “this music is making my ears cum” or something similar to that. My ears are not sexual. They do not have orgasms. They do not ejaculate semen. Just, no. No.
I don’t like the phrase “kill two birds with one stone”. I don’t want to kill birds, and if I did, I wouldn’t try to do it with stones. But killing two birds with one stone? Huh? It’s both confusing and immoral.
What metaphorical phrases just piss you off?
“You can’t have your cake and eat it too”. Sure you can. Eat half the cake and you’ve still got half your cake and you’ve eaten it.
to ‘‘egg [someone] on’’ as, in, encourage bad behavior
I don’t know what eggs have to do with anything, and I don’t like to think about food in non-food contexts.
Does that even count as a metaphor? I don’t know, because I don’t understand.
And on the flipside is the one about catching more flies with honey than vinegar. Who does that? You don’t CATCH flies, you kill them. You spray them, you swat them, you smack their brains all over the wall, but you sure as hell don’t ruin a big old jar of perfectly good honey by intentionally getting a swarm of flies stuck in it. Ew.
I have never heard that phrase before, and now, because I have a visual imagination, I’m going to need brain bleach to get it out of my head. Ew.
“It’s a no-brainer.” I can’t even articulate why it’s irritating because it irritates me too much to think about it. Look at it and try to parse it and then grimace.
“All but”.
It seems to convey the opposite meaning to what it really means.
This one. Geez, what an asinine phrase. I get what it’s trying to convey, but what’s the point of having a cake if you, or someone else, isn’t going to eat it? Are you supposed to just sit and watch it until it hardens into granite?
Ewww. Ew ew ew. Who says that??
It irks me to hear words like “delicious” used metaphorically, in non-food contexts. Personal and irrational, I know.
We’ve had whole threads about this one. The meaning would probably be clearer if you said “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.”
Why do you think that? The meaning seems clear and unambiguous enough to me. How could it be interpreted to mean the opposite? (Also, it is not a metaphor.)
No. That way it sounds like it is about sex!
Man this is a lame thread. It would be so much better if you folks would give a 110 percent…
This may help: Dictionary.com, “egg,” in Dictionary.com Unabridged. Source location: Random House, Inc. Egg Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com. Available: http://dictionary.reference.com. Accessed: April 13, 2010.
Looks likes there was an Old Norse word ‘eggja’ which meant ‘incite’.
Nope – it’s still absurd, for precisely the reason Angel of Doubt gave. And I agree wholeheartedly. The phrase would make a scintilla of sense if there actually existed a reason for having the cake besides eating it. But unless you’re a window decorator or an advertisement photographer, the phrase is pointless. You can’t have your virgin and have sex with it, too. But at least I can use my virgin to catch unicorns.
Maybe I can use the cake to catch more flies than I can with vinegar. But I’d rather eat the cake.
“Begs the question”
Of course there are reasons to have a cake and not eat it. Maybe it’s someone’s birthday, and you want to bring them some cake. It would be a bad idea to eat it before the party even starts, right? So you can’t eat the cake, and then still bring it to birthday boy.
Well, you could eat a slice or two. But that’s really bad form.
I detest what I call Corporate Latin. It’s probably nothing in and of itself so much as the overuse when I worked in a cubicle farm.
“Let’s touch base here, run this up the flagpole see how it flies, have a win-win situation, I’ve got a full plate, etc.”. I translated the Lord’s prayer into it once.
I had a boss there who could easily have inspired Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole’s character) in Office Space- total cliche and banality spouting self-impressed drone. He was such an asskisser that he kept a picture of his boss’s kid on his desk. He also had a lot of personal issues that sometimes made him mangle the Corporate Latin a bit- “let’s run this up the flagpole and see how… it… you know… touches base”.
I wrote a short story at the time based in a “what if Poe worked in a cubicle” vein in which the character inspired by him speaks in cliches that become more mangled and macabre as his life devolves. “Let’s run this up the base and see the flagpole” gives way to “Let’s run our hand down her shirt and see when she says ‘Stop Daddy’…”, or “Let’s make sure you and me are pissing on the same homeless guy…”, “Let’s cut the bitch’s throat and see how the Luminol glows next week…”, or “Sorry, I got enough remains in my hatchback to take on another pair of legs…”.
To this day corporate Latin makes me grimace and giggle just a tad.
Why does there need to be a second purpose for the cake? I believe the person in the idiom wants to eat their cake now and still have it to eat later. But (s)he can’t have it both ways. This is apparently not a very big cake.
I hate it when people say someone is “speaking out of school” or “speaking out of turn.” If you know you shouldn’t be talking, don’t. If you know you shouldn’t be talking but are planning to do so anyway, apologizing for “speaking out of school/turn” is not going to make whatever it is you’re about to say somehow less offensive or not your business. And if what you’re saying is valuable, it doesn’t matter if you’re speaking out of school/turn.
Another thing I hate (and I’m not sure this truly applies) is when people describe music or theater as organic. Was it grown without pesticides? Really?
I’m not sure how a dead cat became the standard object that one should be able to swing without hitting something.
I’m also not sure how skinning a cat became our canonical example of an activity that can be performed in more than one way. Especially since I’m not sure there is more than one way, or why anyone might skin enough cats to require more than one way.
“It is what it is”.
No shit, Sherlock. What the hell else would it be? If this is all you can think to say about the situation, don’t say anything. Otherwise, you’ll just confirm that you’re as stupid and uncreative as I suspect you are.