this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
98 points (90.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43893 readers
949 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not sure if you read the couching of my statement that there are smoke machines.
Or that, you know, I'm an analytical chemist for smoke.... And there may be smoke without fires (as I eluded to in the original post), but where there is a fire there is absolutely smoke. And I believe I've taken at least a chemistry course to get where I am today... But who says the universe wasn't created last Thursday...
Also there are some idioms that are never true, how are they not worse than an idiom that "isn't always true"? I think your scale on idioms are off as much as your judgement of people's chemistry backgrounds.
Because I was thinking mainly of idioms in this kind of context. Many idioms wouldn't be said in this context. Other idioms that have even more negative potential include but are not limited to...
"Spare the rod, spoil the child."
"One bad apple ruins the whole bunch."
"Fight fire with fire." (why the Hell would someone fight fire with fire)
"Flies are attracted more by honey than vinegar."
"Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are."
The idiom in question is "where there's smoke there's fire" and it alludes to the idea that "much ado" is never about nothing, that commotion is never born in a vacuum. This is neither true literally or figuratively (people do not operate in the same way as smoke and fire, people seem more analogous to snow avalanching down a mountain if we are to update the idiom), but the fact it's not even true literally spells out a glaring problem with even invoking the idiom. The reverse statement, "where there's fire there's smoke", isn't true either.