It was a small, intentional example of how annoying they can be. See? It worked.
Here’s one I’ve run into a couple times, and it never fails to piss me off:
“It will be all right in the end; if it is not all right, it is not yet the end.”
After my son died, I can’t tell you how many times I heard, “it will get better with time”.
No, it won’t. Time will never cancel it out. It’s always there. What is going to happen in the future to make it better? He will always be gone and I will never stop missing him. I think about him every single day, numerous times. I may not cry every time I think about him, but it will always hurt.
When I hear this one I always think of the immortal words of Wreckless Eric in the song “Whole Wide World”:
When I was a young boy
My mother said to me
'There’s only one girl in the world for you
And she probably lives in Tahiti’.
But custard is thicker than blood, so…?
h/t/ Eddie Izzard
I say “Gesundheit” too. What do I look like - the Pope?
Money is not a sufficient condition for happiness, but it may well be a necessary one.
Yeah. I hold my tongue on this one because I don’t want to be a dick to someone that has lost a beloved pet, but it’s just so fucking saccharine.
I use it a lot, usually to mean “Not only are you wrong but you clearly are too fucking stupid to notice it and for some reason take pride in it. Please proceed, Governor.”
I don’t think “it will get better with time” is ever meant as “someday it will be like it never even happened” - just that the acute grief you are experiencing in the days immediately after the loss of a loved one will become manageable in the long run. Having said that, it might be better if people didn’t offer specific predictions for the course of anyone else’s grief.
When my mom died several years ago, a family friend was careful not to tell me how it would be for me, but he did relate his own experience of losing his mother many years prior - specifically that for a couple of years afterward, thoughts of her made him sad, but eventually he found that thoughts of her (e.g. thinking of how she would have reacted to the mundane events of his daily life) made him smile; remembering his mother had become a pleasant experience. He ended by saying that things that called to mind his deceased relatives, including her, were a blessing to him. My siblings and I all felt that it was actually a pretty uplifting message.
I’ve never quite understood this one, either. What, exactly, am I sorry for?
I really don’t know what to say to someone who is grieving the death of a loved one. I find it to be an uncomfortable & awkward situation. I am certainly empathetic, and I feel sad because they’re sad. But anything I say seems trite or disingenuous. So I just say “I am sorry,” because that’s what’s expected, and leave it at that.
Or the stoner version: “S’all guhhh man…”
The first time I heard this I blurted out a very fast list of calamities: “It’s ALL good? War, pestilence, disease, people kicking puppies and drowning cats, is that all good?”
.
“Everything happens for a reason.”
I saw a book at church:
. . . . Everything Happens for a Reason
. . . . . . . .. . . AND OTHER LIES CHRISTIANS TELL
It was Dear Abby or Ann Landers, or someone wrote about handling chain sneezes. She wrote: The first sneeze merits a “Bless you”, the second a “My that IS a sneeze isn’t it”, and the third “Don’t you think you’d feel better at home?”
“I’m sorry” doesn’t have to mean you’re apologizing for something. It’s another way of saying you’re feeling sorrow, as in, “I’m sad that you’re going through this.” To wit:
sor·ry
/ˈsärē,ˈsôrē/
adjective
adjective: sorry ; comparative adjective: sorrier ; superlative adjective: sorriest
- feeling distress, especially through sympathy with someone else’s misfortune.
“I was sorry to hear about what happened to your family”
And I do the reverse. There’s a few acquaintances who recoil angrily if anyone want to pray for them.
I have taken to using “I’m keeping a good thought for you”, which I learned from a colleague a while ago. It could be taken for a prayer, or just as it’s worded, by the person receiving it, depending on how they want to receive it.
At a school I taught at years ago, there was a platitude posted above the entrance to the football team’s locker room: “DO WHATEVER IT TAKES”
It used to always make my blood boil.
Really? That’s the message you want to send to impressionable young people? That to succeed in the school’s football program you needed to do whatever it takes?
Because after all, “whatever” literally encompasses everything, including cheating in academics and/or on the field, doping, sabotaging the other team, etc.
I’m a common chain sneezer. Sometimes I go on for five minutes or more. I usually leave the room around sneeze four or five, when it’s clear I ain’t stopping.
My husband is like that. He’ll sneeze twenty or thirty times in a row. This is one reason we have to watch TV with the closed captioning on. 
I despise that saying,it’s like saying I give up,let’s all die now!
I prefer “Ewwww, clean that up!”
IOW, “Dude, your pet’s dead.”
At least you know he’s up to snuff.
Yeah. When my older brother’s wife died, he said “Nobody better Goddamn say she’s in a better place. If she was in a better place she’d be here.”
Of course, her former boss, a real-estate-agent-turned-preacher, did the eulogy and said exactly that. My brother kept his cool and let it slide, though I’m sure he had steam coming out of his ears.
“They’re in a better place” is one of the seriously stupidest and presumptuous things one can say under the circumstances.
warning- minor witnessing
I believe my niece is in heaven. I believe that if I do good deeds, I’ll end up there too.
None of that was any help when she was killed. If I told you you’re loved one had moved to mansion in Hawaii (or wherever you’d prefer) and would be deliriously happy, but you wouldn’t see or communicate with them for a few decades- wouldn’t you still be devastated?
“Blood is thicker than water, but it makes lousy lemonade!” - Alfred E. Neuman