The Land Rover entered production in 1948 and was launched at the Amsterdam Motor Show. Its designer, Maurice Wilks of Rover, took the wartime Jeep as his inspiration. The vehicle “was designed for farm and light industrial use.” Its body was made of aluminium “due to the post-war steel shortage and aluminium surplus.”
“The Land Rover was designed to only be in production for two or three years.”
In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, first broadcast on BBC radio on 8 March 1978, the Guide’s entry for the planet Earth is a single word: “Harmless.” Ford Prefect writes a much longer entry. The Guide’s editor trims it to “Mostly Harmless.”
On 9 November 1895, the magazine Punch published a cartoon called “True Humility.” A bishop says to a curate: “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!” The curate replies: “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!”
A curate’s egg became an English phrase for something that is partly good and partly bad.
Simon Cowell was a judge on the television talent show Pop Idol, which began in 2001. According to Britannica, the show’s popularity “was partly due to Cowell’s acerbic put-downs of contestants.” Hello magazine called him “Mr Nasty.”
In November 2001, the magazine Spiked noted that the judging had “raised whimpers from those who believe young people should not be receiving such a publicly hard time.”
In a letter of 16 December 1816 to her nephew James Edward Austen, Jane Austen praised his “strong, manly, spirited sketches, full of variety and glow.” She then described her own writing as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour?”
P. G. Wodehouse dedicated The Heart of a Goof, published in 1926: “To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.”
He had made the same joke before. A Gentleman of Leisure, published in 1910, was dedicated to Herbert Westbrook, “without whose never-failing advice, help, and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.”
In the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien answered the book’s critics. “The most critical reader of all, myself, now finds many defects, minor and major,” he wrote. He would leave them alone, he said, except for one that others had noted: “the book is too short.”
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,” Isaac Newton is reported to have said, while “the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
The words are not found in Newton’s own writings. They first appeared in print in Joseph Spence’s Anecdotes, published in 1820, based on an account by Andrew Michael Ramsay. Whether Newton said them cannot be confirmed.
In May 2011, Professor Eileen Munro published the final report of her review of child protection for the government. She described “a system that has become over-bureaucratised and focused on compliance.” She criticized “the undue importance given to performance indicators and targets.” Her recommendations were meant to “help professionals move from a compliance culture to a learning culture.”
In 1975, the economist Charles Goodhart wrote an article on monetary management in the United Kingdom. In it he observed: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”
The idea became known as Goodhart’s law. A common wording of it appears in a 1997 paper by Marilyn Strathern on audit in British universities: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”