An intrusive thought I return to often is how "I want a pony" is the canonical example of an unreasonable request but, like, if you look into it even a little you'll find it's not hard at all to acquire a pony. On raw purchase price a pony is far cheaper than a car and probably not much more than a good ebike. You're gonna have to invest time and money into pony upkeep but, of all the aspirational goals you could set yourself in life "a pony" is one of the more attainable ones
I have similar unproductive kneejerk reactions to "the sky is blue" as the canonical example of a undeniable, basic factual truth (the sky can take many different colors, varying in both time and space; someone insisting "the sky is blue" as an axiomatic, unchanging truth is necessarily denying someone else's lived experience) and also the cliche "you can't have your cake and eat it too" (eat half the cake now and save the other half for later. Don't you have a refrigerator?)
@saddestrobots@mcc Yes, thank you. The cake cliché is one I legitimately didn't understand for years because the order of it implies a chronology that I saw no contradiction in. It's meant to mean, apparently, "Eating the cake while still having an uneaten cake,"
I legitimately thought the cliché referenced gluttony: "Look how high-and-mighty they are, buying a whole cake and then subsequently eating a whole cake alone!"
@saddestrobots@mcc I thought that was the point... "have your cake" does exactly mean "eat your cake". So you can't eat it twice. You can't have it and then eat it. Because you already had it. But now I'm reading the Wikipedia article and there is all this tortured stuff about "have" meaning "possess" and verb order and Ayn Rand and the Unabomber and anarcho-capitalist economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It's intolerable.