According to wikipedia there are 2 versions of Sturgeon’s Law; the well-known and easily understood “90% of everything is crap”, and the lesser-known and (to me) confusing statement, “Nothing is always absolutely so”.
I don’t really know what to make of that second one. How do you even parse that sentence? What does it mean?
“There are no absolutes” - for example, if I say, “every Buick is a heap of junk” someone is bound to come along with a Buick that’s done 650,000 miles.
I don’t think they’re supposed to be versions of the same law. They’re obviously different Sturgeon’s Laws. Therre must be a third one somewhere, because “Laws Come in Sets of Three”.
That’s known as CalMeacham’s Third Law.
No, Opal was making a comment about the propriety of making lists with fewer than three items. She wasn’t making a meta-law about laws. My formulation (which I’ve been using for years, although calling it by my real name, rather than my nom de SDMB, results from years of observing that Great Men have Laws in Sets of Three – Newton’s Three Laws, Kepler’s Three Laws, The Three Laws of Thermodynamics, Euler’s Three Laws, Clarke’s Three Laws, and so on.
There’s no wiggle room on always or absolutely. I have looked at “Nothing is … so” from several angles and hammered on it a bit, and I can see two meanings. One of these is useless, and the other is cynical.
The state of not being anything will forever, without variation, be just that. (in which so substitutes for the earlier nothing.)
No thing will ever be completely true. (where so means true.) The law applies to itself, so it is not always completely true.