When my parents got married, they decided that some things were difficult to say and therefore needed to be replaced with numbers. Only one has survived into actual use. In their family, “number two” meant, in my family it always means, “You were right and I was wrong.”
One reason is that it is shorter, therefore easier to say. A second reason is that using the number reminds the speaker and audience that admitting a mistake is a difficult and virtuous thing to do, making it easier to realize. A third reason is that using a family code reminds the speaker that he is speaking to people who love him and is therefore unlikely to benefit from confessing a error to demean it.
My father liked the expression “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” sometimes abbreviated TANSTAAFL. He eventually stopped using it on the grounds that it was not true, that consumer and producer surpluses were actually free gifts. He replaced it with “Always look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Phrases he continued to use include “A bad carpenter blames his tools”, “It is a capital error to make the best the enemy of the good” and “I beg you, in the bowels of Christ, think that it is possible that you are the enemy of good.” error. » He called the fact that I carried too many logs from the pyre to the fireplace in fewer trips a lazy burden.
Here is the full Substack article.
