What is the origin of the expression “fight fire with fire”, and in what context was it originally used? It seems to me that fighting fire with fire would be sort of…pointless, because obviously it’s not going to be very effective. Most people fight fires with fire extinguishers or big hoses or blankets and much stamping.
fire ----> <---- fire
=BIG FIRE
Or is it like when you have a grass fire, and you burn a strip around it so it doesn’t spread because there’s nothing to burn around its little contained area?
wildfire
----> little fire
=no more fire.
As you can probably tell…I’m desperately in need of clarification.
The preventative burning method was what sprung to mind but it may mean ‘raising the stakes to a similar level’.
Rather than actually fighting ‘fire’ with fire it may mean the equivalent of ‘fighting somebody using fire’ with fire.
If someone was using underhand techniques against you the term ‘fighting fire with fire’ might mean that you are willing to stoop to the same level.
Just a thought!
“Hey, they’re lighting our troops on fire! Maybe we should light there troops on fire!”
“Hey, they’re burning our village, let’s burn them”.
“Hey, pull up along the port side and light them on fire before they can light us on fire!”
Fire has been a weapon at the end of arrows, torches, hruled by catapult, by creative flame throwers devies on sailing ships and so on. Fighting fire with fire was good battle smarts, because it was one of the most lethal weapons prior to modern warfare. Heck, firebombing was effective in the 20th century as well.
I think “fighting fire with fire” was in use long before the technique of backfires or prescrived burns came into use for fighting forest or range fires.
I suspect it is “tit for tat” raised to some power.
Actually, I think you are referring to back burning.
“Prescribed” burning is defined in A Guide for Prescribed Fire in Southern Forests as fire applied in a knowledgeable manner to forest fuels on a specific land area under selected weather conditions to accomplish predetermined, well-defined management objectives. In short, long before there is a forest fire, small fires are intentionally set and monitored to reduce fuels. This prevents a later forest fire from causing significant damage and destruction.
Back burning refers to a method where fire fighters intentionally set small fires in front of an advancing forest fire. This controlled burn removes fuels and prevents the much larger fire from continuing its march.
It is common to put out large liquid fuel fires (oil wells, etc.) with explosives. In that case, you’re briefly starving the fire of oxygen, with the hope that there is insufficient heat available to re-ignite it once the oxygen becomes available again.
Not quite fighting fire with fire, but cool nonetheless.
I doubt it, unless that expression has been around for a good few hundred years. There are refernces to backburning in Indian literature dating back a few centuries at least. I suspect that backburning has been used ever since people started growing crops.
With the understanding, of course, that the use in English of the word “fire” to indicate the act of discharging a weapon originated from the practice of touching flame to powder in a firearm or cannon (through the firehole) in order to ignite the powder and propel the missile from the barrel. Viggo Mortensen may look ferocious crying “FIRE!” from the battlements of Helm’s Deep, but Aragorn would have had no idea why he was using that word to tell a row of archers to shoot at the enemy.
Yes, “back burning” was what I meant. But prescribed burns also fight fires by removing fuel from the envirnment in a controlled manner. So while it’s not fighting a current fire, it could be said to be fighting future fires.
We are just trading opinions here but I don’t think that the burning of stubble in agriculture involved a lot of fire control science. I think they just waited until the wind was blowing away from their village and touched it off.
Christine Amer says, in her excellently researched American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, says it is first recorded in Shakespeare…Coriolanus. Hunt for it.
I thought ‘fighting fire with fire’ was just something that sounded ridiculous-- because you’re supposed to fight fire with water. Maybe it doesn’t refer to any realistic situation, it’s pointing out a nonsensical tactic.
I thought ‘fighting fire with fire’ was just something that sounded ridiculous-- because you’re supposed to fight fire with water. Maybe it doesn’t refer to any realistic situation, it’s pointing out a nonsensical tactic that would only make things worse.
It works, sometimes. Take chimney fires, for instance. In that case, they make a flare-type product that you activate and throw into the fireplace/wood stove. It burns with such an intensity that it sucks up all the available oxygen so that when it goes out, the original fire is out, or at least smoldering.
Take that and back burning, and you’ve got a nice little axiom going.
No one is talking abot the burning of stubble. When you have your enire winter’s food supply sitting in one fiield awaiting harvest and their is a wildfire rushing towards it, you want to be damn sure of your scence. The only viable method of saving your crop and your life is backbuning, and this procedure has been used for centuries and probably millenia.