"Surely, mine will be rounder."
A phrase which has made me cringe since birth is "don't reinvent the wheel." While I have no desire to make a career out of duplicating the efforts of another, this particular cliche has never failed to stifle my imagination. At the bottom I've always suspected that those who constantly chant mantras against reevaluation of translational motion devices (in as many words) are at least partly protecting one of their past designs they may be overly fond of.
Worst of all, wheels themselves are constantly redesigned. The tire itself was very nearly a reinvention at the time. Look at bikes, cars, trains, factories, segways, and it will become immediately obvious that someone has put a little extra thought into an implementation of a millenia-aged invention. Arguably there is a difference between invention and design, I concede. But next time you hear someone speak of "reinventing the wheel," are they really implying that you're wasting time inventing or wasting time designing?
The imagination-stifling power in these words is seen through their persistence over the last few decades in computer science and software engineering. Here are fields which attract absolutely brilliant, creative minds, and this horrid phrase still hasn't been banished from polite conversation. Perhaps the same vague sentiment of wishing to avoid duplication of effort is there, and rather than coming up with an original, contextually-optimal way of expressing such sentiments, they'd rather use a phrase that's worked before. After all, they don't want to reinvent the wheel.
Worst of all, wheels themselves are constantly redesigned. The tire itself was very nearly a reinvention at the time. Look at bikes, cars, trains, factories, segways, and it will become immediately obvious that someone has put a little extra thought into an implementation of a millenia-aged invention. Arguably there is a difference between invention and design, I concede. But next time you hear someone speak of "reinventing the wheel," are they really implying that you're wasting time inventing or wasting time designing?
The imagination-stifling power in these words is seen through their persistence over the last few decades in computer science and software engineering. Here are fields which attract absolutely brilliant, creative minds, and this horrid phrase still hasn't been banished from polite conversation. Perhaps the same vague sentiment of wishing to avoid duplication of effort is there, and rather than coming up with an original, contextually-optimal way of expressing such sentiments, they'd rather use a phrase that's worked before. After all, they don't want to reinvent the wheel.