Sturgeon's Law, n.

[Dave Monroe]

Sturgeon's Law, n.

Pronunciation: Brit. /ˌstəːdʒ(ə)nz ˈlɔː/,  U.S. /ˈˌstərdʒənz ˈlɔ/

Forms:  19– Sturgeon's Law,   19– Sturgeon's law.

Etymology: < the genitive of the name of Theodore H. Sturgeon
(1918–85, born Edward Hamilton Waldo), U.S. science fiction writer +
law n.1
Compare the following earlier use of the term, referring to a
different aphorism:

1957  T. Sturgeon in Venture Sci. Fiction Mag. July 78 One who has
reduced the cosmos to Sturgeon's Law: Nothing Is Always Absolutely So.

  A humorous aphorism which maintains that most of any body of
published material, knowledge, etc., or (more generally) of everything
is worthless: based on a statement by Sturgeon (see quot. 1957),
usually later cited as ‘90 per cent of everything is crap’.
Typically used of a specific medium, genre, etc., originally and esp.
science fiction, and now freq. also of information to be found on the
Internet.

The aphorism was apparently first formulated in 1951 or 1952 at a
lecture at New York University (letter to the O.E.D. from Fruma Klass,
the wife of science fiction writer Phil Klass (‘William Tenn’), 5 Dec.
2001), and popularized at the 1953 WorldCon science fiction convention
(see J. Gunn in N.Y. Rev. Sci. Fiction (1995) Sept. 20).

[1957  T. Sturgeon in Venture Sci. Fiction Sept. 49 On that hangs
Sturgeon's revelation. It came to him that s f is indeed
ninety-percent crud, but that also—Eureka!—ninety-percent of
everything is crud. All things—cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles,
people and pins are, to the expert and discerning eye, crud, except
for the acceptable tithe which we each happen to like.]

1960  P. Schuyler Miller in Astounding Sci. Fact & Fiction 162/2
Theodore Sturgeon once attacked it from the other side with what has
become known as Sturgeon's Law: ‘Ninety per cent of everything is
crud.’ The remaining ten per cent is what we call ‘good’ and ten per
cent of that—one story in a hundred—is ‘really good’.

1977 Washington Post (Nexis) 29 Aug. b1 What we're in for in movies
and television is a deluge.‥ If I may I'd like to quote (sci-fi writer
Theodore) Sturgeon's Law: ‘90 per cent of everything is crap’.
Television seems to bear that out.

1984 Computer Magazines in net.flame (Usenet newsgroup) 3 Feb., Is
anyone else disgusted with what is happening to the computer
magazines? I realize that Sturgeon's law is a strong force‥but this is
getting putrid!

1996 PC World (Nexis) Dec., ‘Ever heard of Sturgeon's law?’ He shook
his head. ‘“Ninety percent of everything is crap.” If that's true of
anything, it's true of the Web. Ninety percent of everything on it
isn't even worth the time it takes to download’.

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