Inane cliches/truisms you could go the rest of your life without hearing again

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Anything involving the term 'nature' or 'natural'

Oh, this thread could be fun... But that was just a start.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

In terms of history? The fact that people were nominally 'more religious' in the past or that people were somehow less sexually adventurous. Human behaviour is remarkably stable.

While I would disagree with your conclusion here I would agree that those two talking points are particularly annoying.

I would also argue against the idea that we were particularly more brutal, barbarian or savage in the past than now.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

The only one I can think of at the moment is, "people though the world was flat in Columbus's day," simply because it's erroneous.  Just about every educated person in Columbus's time knew that the Earth was round.

True.  The reason Columbus had problems getting anyone to sponsor him was that the natural philosophers of the day largely thought the distance between Europe and China was far greater than Columbus supposed it was.  They considered it impossible for a sailing ship to carry sufficient provision to make the journey there and back, and they were right.  The distance was too far to make it to China. What no one apparently considered was there might be unknown lands between Europe and China.

Actually the Spanish Royals thought it was possible that he would find more islands like the Canaries (then ongoing Spanish Colonization and eradication of the indigenous inhabitants) or the Azores. Which, after the first voyage, was what it seemed Columbus had found.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

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Never heard of the first one but wife beating only became illegal in Common law systems in the nineteenth century (due to, in part, the influence of nineteenth century feminism). And as for marital rape, at least in Ireland and the UK the first ever prosecutions for that happened in my lifetime...

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That depends on what you mean by 'anti-sex' and by 'romantic love'

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Not just mortality but also patterns of work and life. While as a totality it is wrong, the idea is still mostly correct if we compare to any modern notion of 'childhood'.