ABSTRACT
With maxims like these we counsel persistence in our children, and sometimes in our peers and ourselves. Yet, a moment’s reflection reveals limitations of these familiar sayings. For example, we have all faced tasks at which practice makes mostly weary, and perfection remains elusive; need I mention those piano lessons some of the more ham-handed of us were nudged into by our parents, or the dashed hopes of countless budding prima ballerinas whose petite frames were done in by the ravages of puberty? A major problem with these maxims, like most, is that in their succinctness they oversimplify; they do not, and of course cannot, take into account the range of situations people may actually encounter, nor of the fact that in many of those situations the maxim in question is simply bad advice. Perhaps it is partly in reaction to such situations that our culture has developed a downbeat counterpart to most upbeat maxims, thus permitting the construction of such balanced, bipolar maxims as: https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315802343/a797e899-470b-4911-8893-40cf7957fe48/content/fig0001_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315802343/a797e899-470b-4911-8893-40cf7957fe48/content/fig0001a_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
