Cf. Tolstoy: all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
What happens twice probably happens more than twice: are there other notable expressions of this idea?
(There’s a well-known principle in software development that’s pretty close, though I can’t find a Famous Quotation of it right now: when you’re choosing a name for a variable or function or whatever, avoid abbreviations: there’s only one way to spell a word right, and lots of ways to spell it wrong. Though this is not always good advice.)
Biblical verse on the asymmetry of error: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.”
That’s an interesting comparison. I always took the broad/narrow contrast to be about how easy each path is, and about how many take them, rather than how varied each is, but clearly the ideas are related.
True enough. But then there are even more ways to spell it wrong, and the general principle still holds. (With a possible exception for cases where you abbreviate a word in such a way as to remove the bits whose spelling differs. But, e.g. “col” is seldom likely to be a good abbreviation for “colo[u]r”, not least because “column” will be a distracting other meaning...)
Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Reflections on Exile
Cf. Tolstoy: all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
What happens twice probably happens more than twice: are there other notable expressions of this idea?
(There’s a well-known principle in software development that’s pretty close, though I can’t find a Famous Quotation of it right now: when you’re choosing a name for a variable or function or whatever, avoid abbreviations: there’s only one way to spell a word right, and lots of ways to spell it wrong. Though this is not always good advice.)
Biblical verse on the asymmetry of error: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.”
That’s an interesting comparison. I always took the broad/narrow contrast to be about how easy each path is, and about how many take them, rather than how varied each is, but clearly the ideas are related.
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Usually agreed, on both counts. But: color/colour (and other US/UK pairs...)
True enough. But then there are even more ways to spell it wrong, and the general principle still holds. (With a possible exception for cases where you abbreviate a word in such a way as to remove the bits whose spelling differs. But, e.g. “col” is seldom likely to be a good abbreviation for “colo[u]r”, not least because “column” will be a distracting other meaning...)