I'm looking for examples from history, folklore, literature, movies, or pop culture, of situations in which a person or group attempted to do something helpful but, due to their own poor judgment, incompetence, or naïveté, ended up causing harm to the people, project, or cause that they intended to help. The main idea is that the erstwhile helpers are to blame for the damage they caused, to such an extent that the fact that they meant well is no excuse.  I'm asking this for the purpose of having a vivid, emotive example to use in a piece of persuasive writing, in which merely stating the fact that harm was caused is not sufficiently impactful.
10545
I want to say "someone (or something) intends to help, but instead it makes things worse". Is there any succinct expression or phrase for this?  Thanks.
95719
There is a kind of situation that seems to occur somewhat commonly, that goes something like:   Figure out some way to handle a particular situation do it regularly, and make a habit of it, as it seems to work OK … … and only much later actually realize that it very much isn’t OK, that it’s been doing harm all the time, and that it’s too late to fix anything.   Does there exist any good words or phrases for this kind of situation?
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Often times someone will tell a long winded story, and then someone will reply with something like "So basically you just had a bad day."  Another, I think better example is when someone will talk a lot about existentialism, and then someone else will reply with "So basically 'to be or not to be, that is the question.'"  Or another example, someone will talk about Cuban-American relations after the cold war, and someone will reply with "So basically America plugged their ears and pretended Cuba didn't exist."  I don't think the word 'oversimplify' is good enough, because it can actually increase the importance of something. For example "So basically if you don't recycle, everyone will die of global warming."
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If someone is the bearer of bad news you might say, Don't shoot the messenger. If you have something that seems unfortunate at first but ends out wonderful you might say it's a blessing in disguise.  I'm looking for a word or phrase that is a combination of the two - a bad experience that is actually bad, but ultimately heralds something good.  For example - if a couple is trying to get pregnant, and the wife gets morning sickness. There is nothing fun about vomiting and nausea, but it potentially heralds wonderful news for the soon-to-be-parents.  Is there an expression to describe the morning sickness?
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Although the word martyr somewhat applies, it includes a nobility not necessarily present.  An idiom describing this, in a voluntary situation, would be drawing the short straw, thereby acquiring some unpleasant or dangerous duty. An idiom for an involuntary situation would be getting thrown under the bus.  Context  Friend: I knew someone would eventually need to refactor this code. I didn't think it would be me.  Me: You're our... uh, what's the word?
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People often make these mistakes in speech on purpose, just for amusement. Sometimes, however, they are unintentional and prove even funnier.  In this case, is there a specific term for them?  e.g.        "belly jeans"  for  "jelly beans"   "a can of boot reer"  for  "a can of root beer"   "a wottle of bine"  for  "a bottle of wine"   "holed and sealed"  for  "soled and healed"    "cling spreaning"  for  "spring cleaning"
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Suppose that  (1990) is considered appalling, but you can't put your finger on exactly why, mainly because there are a plethora of reasons, most of which you lack the training/education/expertise to comment in-depth on (e.g. the writing, directing, editing etc.), so you use what you consider to be a disastrous moment/scene as an example, and think "this pretty much sums it up", for example , what would you call a scene like that? A single word or expression is satisfactory.  As an example:     "The Godfather 3 is so bad, for so many reasons, but here is a ______ that perfectly represents everything wrong with the movie."   An expression is also acceptable, and the example I gave is flexible (doesn't have to be structured as it is in the example).
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I encounter the phrase "I will appreciate your help" from time to time and it doesn't sound too honest to me. To be more specific, I don't have a problem with this phrase coming from a friend, because he will appreciate my help by "owing me one". But a stranger from the Internet, that's different, methinks.  "How will you appreciate it?" pops in my mind every time I see it, because to me, appreciation equals reward and, well, you can't reward people over the internet much. It is quite possible that I am just wrong and this is a perfectly fine figure of speech.
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I'm searching for a word representing "Negatively surprising", or "Negatively amused" in an appropriate form. Example: Someone who proclaims he aims to do things in the right way has done something in the completely opposite way.    How could you have done such a thing? That action is very ___.   Said with the purpose of showing the contrast between the expected and the actual, and asking for change to adhere with his set goals, instead of just pointing out disappointment.  It is different from  because it asks there about surprise of being affected by the disappointment. The meaning of surprise here is different.
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Examples:  Anyway, after that I went home and went to sleep. Anyhow, do you want to go for a drink? So then, I was chatting to this girl and... Now, Bob was a nice guy, but socially inept. Her cooking was, well, terrible.  These words are distinct from fillers like 'umm' and 'err' because they are often used intentionally in written, usually informal, English, such as writing expressing a conversational tone.
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Wasn't really sure how to phrase this, but I'm thinking of an instance in which someone diminishes a problem by presenting one of larger scope - as a rather shoddy example, "x political problem in America doesn't matter because half the world's population is starving."  I honestly have no idea if this is considered fallacious or not, but for some odd reason I can't shake the feeling that someone has described it to me as a fallacy before. Am I crazy or is there something to this (or something similar)?
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Specifically, I'm looking for the term for when a person uses a word correctly, but intends a different meaning.  For example:     I empathize with you.   When the person really means:     I sympathize with you.   Both sentences are grammatically correct.  They both have meaning, and as sentences they are both "correct"...they're just incorrect in this case. This isn't a case of a malapropism where a similar sounding word is inserted with ludicrous results, nor is it a parapraxis, eggcorn, or mondegreen (as I understand them).  It's simply a case where a person either misunderstood the difference between the two and thus chose the wrong word or the person did understand but believed (in this case) they empathized when in fact they only sympathized.  I'd like to say something like "You made a grammatical mistake/error" - except in this case it isn't grammar...
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I was reading definition/meaning of the word "perverse" in , came across :     showing deliberate determination to behave in a way that most people think is wrong, unacceptable or unreasonable   Shouldn't it be :     showing deliberate determination to behave in a way that most people think it is wrong, unacceptable or unreasonable
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I'm looking for an idiom to describe something that has a negligible effect.   The only similar question I found here was: , but I'm looking for something else.  I remember it being something to do with water or fire. Something along the lines of throwing a very small amount of water on a large fire? Does anyone know what I'm thinking of?
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I think some good words would be conflicted, or confused. As an example of context, think of someone who believes in freedom of speech, but, at the same time, they would support banning comedians who make jokes about certain issues that person cares about.
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Something small goes wrong, and this triggers something slightly bigger, which triggers something slightly bigger, and so on and so forth until you end up with a chain of problems of increasing severity until it ends in catastrophy.  Something like the old saying "for want of a nail the battle was lost", only highlighting that each intermediate issue was a problem in its own right, not just a stepping-stone to the final disaster.  Is there a common word/phrase that specifically describes this? I'm thinking "cascade of ever-increasing problems", but this seems clumsy, and I suspect there might already be a neat word or expression that covers it.
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Is there a similar saying or idiomatic expression in English, which would correlate with the above-mentioned one, implying that misfortune will befall even on those ones, already in trouble ?