Updated 28-Jun-2024
One annoying phrase which tends to be more useless than anything is:
> We can agree to disagree
Thanks to Wikipedia we know that this phrase may be close to 250 years old. We also know that it implies a kind of tolerance but lack of acceptance of another persons' position. However, there are several problems with this:
* If someone simply understands the position, but disagrees with it, why not just say that?
* Agree to disagree at the syntactical level is a contradiction
* The other side may not in fact agree to the agreement to disagree
The basic idiocy of this phrase is best characterized by it's being named a thought-terminating cliché.
