From "git --help config": "To avoid confusion and troubles with script usage, aliases that hide existing git commands are ignored."

> “Use git checkout.”

This is just a jab at how "checkout" does too many different things.

> “I have a historical record of a merge commit with two parents. How can I find out which branch each parent was originally made on?”

Git doesn't let you do this.

> “Surely some of these could be made more consistent, so as to be easier to remember in the heat of coding?”

Git commands can be inconsistent.

> “git -h branch“.

This command tells you nothing about "branch" (throws error), whereas "git --help branch" launches the browser at git-branch's manpage. This goes against what people usually expect (that "-h" is just shorthand for "--help".

One Thing Well demonstrates how one command (git checkout), while it does do 'one thing well' (changing your working directory to match something in the index), can handle a wide variety of seemingly unrelated use cases.

Only the Gods demonstrates how history can mean different things: commit parentage, which is usually immutable, and branch history, which is ephemeral.

The Hobgoblin probably refers to the Emerson quote "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

The Long and the Short of It is about how git accepts `git --help command`, `git command --help`, and `git command -h` but `git -h command` returns an argument error.

A theme here is that git does not try to anticipate your workflow. Its commands and options are named based on what they do, rather than how you should probably use them. This makes git a very powerful tool, but with an interface that is often counter-intuitive.

The somewhat inconsistent command line interface / option / argument parsing in git can sometimes lead to very unexpected results.