Sturgeon's Law, n.

[Erik T. Burns]

You! You are the 1%!!!

On 11/24/11, Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, yours are. Mine are all glittering gems of witty, cogent analysis.
>
> Sometimes, I read them aloud just to hear the soothing sounds of my
> own voice reading something so brilliant.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 7:28 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So then 90% of posts on the plist are crap?
>>
>> On Nov 21, 2011 9:57 PM, "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> 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’.
>>>
>>> http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/246938
>>
>