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Comment by gitgud | Hacker News Reader

It's strange how the "Jack of all trades" phrase changed over time. The original phrase was:

"Jack of all traits,

Master of none,

Still better than a master of one"

The original phrase is much more against specialisation, however omitting the last two lines makes it almost belittle generalization... The meaning of the phrase has basically reversed over the years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades,_master_of_...

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> "Still better than a master of one" is a recent addendum to the phrase.

Your wikipedia link says the last line is not included in the original phrase

Something similar happened with "Blood is thicker than water", a phrase used to convey the importance of family, where the original quote is "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb", which conveys the exact opposite, that ties you make yourself are more important than family.

According to Wikipedia [0] it's not as clear as you make it out to be.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water

My favorite is "Great minds think alike" the full expression is "Great minds think alike. Fools rarely differ."

In the reference you cite, it says ""Still better than a master of one" is a recent addendum to the phrase."

Whereas it says "Jack of all trades, master of none" (without your recent addition) is from 1721.

From your link:

> Originally, this wasn't the case and the label 'Jack of all trades' carried no negative connotation, the 'master of none' part being added later.

So it went through three separate versions flip flopping in meaning.

Not that I dispute it, but that sentence is marked with [citation needed] so it should be taken with a grain of salt...

“premature optimization is the root of all evil”

vs.

“Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.”

I frequently see people use that cropped quote to justify paying no attention whatsoever to performance, which usually bites them in the ass (or would have bit them in the ass, if the standards for software weren't so low these days).

The root of evil changes over the years, nowadays it seems shared mutable state is the true root of all evil.

Mutable state is a common form of premature optimization

It certainly cycles back and forth.

In this day and age where hiring managers filter folks based on alphabet soup lists of tech and hum and haw over not 8 years of one of the dozen things and ... it's not even a thing it's a just file format ... and they can't stop using Java and JavaScript interchangeably damn it!

sigh

It's easy to get frustrated by the demands folks have for ... both.

I love learning how the English language has evolved.

Public service announcement: If you're into this stuff-check out the Allusionist Podcast: https://www.theallusionist.org/listen

It's full of fun stories like these. One of my favorite language nuggets—the word "guys" is an eponym—most historians trace it back Guy Fawkes.

There's even more ways you could twist the original:

- Jack of all trades and master of one

- Jack of all trades and master of all

- Master of all trades and jack of none

- Jack of all trades and master of some

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