My daughter loves this one…
It reads much easier if you think of it as
One stitch now will arrest stop this garment from tearing and needing to be repaired with nine stitches later on.
OR
Deal with problems when they’re small, and they easy - leave them to get bigger and you’ll have far more effort.
“All that is gold does not glitter” according to JRRT. Always made the most sense to me.
And there are many English translations that achieve the same - it’s the one well-known metrical version usually sung to the tune “Crimond” where the confusion arises. Another metrical version runs “The King of love my shepherd is, whose goodness faileth never; I nothing lack while I am his and he is mine forever”. No problem there.
“Need X like a hole in the head”= see how long you can survive if we cover all the holes in your head.
“Making a mountain out of a molehill”: breaks the law of the conservation of matter, but would be a marvel of engineering nonetheless.
“He’ll hath no fury like a woman scorned.”: also one who is cold, jealous, hungry, having a bad day, irritable, etc.
If memory serves me right: the Tolkien quote is, in the book, a line of a verse created by Bilbo. Personally, I’ll back Shakespeare any day, against some damned halfling who wasn’t even invented till some 350 years later…
Indeed, I could have done that – drat it !
I’m rather addicted to the alternative-history, etc., novels of Harry Turtledove, and seem to refer to them a good deal on this board. There comes to mind, a thing from his “North America in the 19th / 20th centuries” alternative-history cycle; at one stage of which, an unpleasant totalitarian state comes to be, in part of what we know as the USA. The makers and rulers of said state are, mostly, “rough diamonds” with limited education. There’s a passage where two of these high-ups are discussing a project – for something nasty, no doubt. One of the guys finishes a sentence with a long and quite marvellous word which he has supposedly coined: the sense is akin to “all the same” or “anyhow”, and it’s a combination of “irregardless” and another “non-dictionary” polysyllable.
I forget precisely what the word is; and maddeningly, I just can’t seem able to find the relevant passage in the book – but it was a wondrous bit of butchery of the English language.
The correct quote, in context, is “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned,” and comes from the play “The Mourning Bride” by William Congreve.
This play is also the origin of “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,” usually misquoted as “… savage beast” :dubious:
When somebody believes something is beyond the need for discussion they say it “is a moot point”,
yet the definition of “moot” is just the opposite… “subject to debate, dispute, or uncertainty, and typically not admitting of a final decision”.
My understanding of the term is a bit different.
A moot point is one that is technically correct, but of no force, and derives from the “Moot Courts” used in debate of various historical points.
You can resolve that Lord Cardigan should have gotten clarification of obviously illogical orders before taking action, but that does not change that the Light Brigade charged an active artillery position, instead of the retreating artillery on the flank they were supposed to capture. :smack:
Usually I’ve heard " moot point" to mean not that a subject is beyond the need for discussion because it has been decided, but that the subject doesn’t need to be discussed because there is no practical value to discussing it. Like a “moot court” - there’s plenty of argument but the end result has no practical significance.
True, but your perception while sitting and watching is that it is taking forever.
If you go away and do something else, the water seems to boil much sooner; usually when you are balancing your contact lens on your finger, ready to put it in. 
Just like it did this morning as I was making my tea.
No, you have half your cake.
A sandwich in the hand is worth two you have to get out and drive to the store to pick up. Don’t put down the sandwich in your hand to go get dinner.
It’s like in a movie, where the intrepid hero is being chased by some big monster, only to have some bigger monster jump out and bite the trailing monster. Then it throws that creature out of its mouth so it can start chasing the hero. That’s right, it’s got something to eat in its mouth and it spits it out to go get something else to eat.
Monsters must be bitter.
Where the hell do you drive? When people slow down to 30mph, it’s not “for no reason”, it’s typically because there’s been an accident or some other obstruction like merging traffic, so they have to slow down. And you’ve never been on an interstate trapped between two people driving side by side and both maintaining a leisurely pace while you wish to hurry along?
Roads aren’t necessarily like fluid flow. They don’t obey Bernoulli.
It’s a common thing in these parts to hear the phrase “they need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps,” referring to a poor person or family. Recently I realized that the phrase is absurd; you physically can’t pick yourself up by your bootstraps. Turns out that was the intent when the phrase was coined–to indicate just that, an impossibility.
Ironic that a lot of people around here are poor and ignorant, and don’t have the tools required to “pull themselves up,” and the judgers are actually using the correct phrase incorrectly to condemn them.
What you need to get around this whole cake thing is obvious…
Schrodinger’s nearly as famous cake experiment.
You and a cake are put in a box where you are being restrained by a cord that may or may not be cut if a specific radioactive atom decaying occurs at any given moment…
mmm, quantum cake! You have your cake and get to eat it too!
Ass over teacup is better. It gives a visual…
According to Bugs Bunny cartoons, daring someone to knock a chip of wood off of your shoulder used to be a method of trying to start a fist fight. Random googling seems to support the idea, but that could just be because no one is willing to challenge the rabbit’s authority.
There’s also a rhythm to English language put-downs that the n’t interferes with. “I could CARE less!”
Previous thread on the topic.
If you eat an apple a day, you’ll stay healthy and not have to go to a doctor.
And the next day, eat half of that. And so on, and so on. According to Zeno’s Paradox, you will then always have cake.
My dad always said “don’t shit in your mess kit.”
The implication is “I’ve forgotten maybe 2% of what there is to know on this subject and you’re only impressed with the 1% that you know because you know so damn little about it.”
Oh, cool! It’s fury as in harpy, not fury as in anger. Much more mythological.
I think this was done on an episode of Andy Griffith where Opie challenged a bully. But since you brought it up I thought I’d look, and found thiswiki article. Seems to be a lot of history behind this the whole chip-on-the-shoulder thing, leading up to using it as a challenge to fight.
Does Zeno’s paradox work with baked goods? As long as I only eat half the remaining cake each time, I will have infinite cake?
It occurs to me that seems stupid the way I wrote it. Meant to say if Zeno applies to baked goods, then as long as it’s possible for me to always eat half of the cake, then it doesn’t matter how I eat the cake, I can never eat it all anyway.
“Seeing is believing.” because the truth is “Believing is seeing.” Aloha