• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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    12 days ago

    Yeah, that one is also infuriating to hear people misuse.

    The entire point is not that its a small problem, its that its a big problem.

    Along the same lines:

    “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

    This was originally written as an obviously physically impossible absurdity, a modern equivalent would be the ‘plug the power strip into itself for infinite energy’ memes.

    Yet it is instead used to mean … its time for you to do a lot of hard work, and then you’ll be in a better place.

    When it instead was originally used to describe an extremely dire situation that cannot be solved by doing … the sentence above.