It's often said, and I agree, that "'Better' is the enemy of 'good enough'" -- but I'm not prepared to declare myself the loyal ally of one or the other. There are times when I'm prepared to hold the line against the assault of "better," but there are also times when "good enough" really is not... "Good enough" is a phrase that ought to be used only when "success" is clearly defined. For example, President Kennedy in his May 25, 1961 address to Congress didn't say, "I believe we need to take humanity to the stars." He said, "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." The latter statement clearly defined success in terms of a deadline and a result: it drew a boundary, outside of which any additional capability at any additional cost could quickly be dismissed as another challenge for another day...
I suspect that language wars used to start for reasons described by storyteller Garrison Keillor in his 1985 book "Lake Wobegon Days," in which he told of the frustration of immigrants to the U.S. who found themselves surrounded by people who don't speak the same native language. "You become a yokel ... an idiot," Keillor wrote, no matter how smart and insightful you might have been when you could speak in the language you know best.
It's often said, and I agree, that "'Better' is the enemy of 'good enough'" -- but I'm not prepared to declare myself the loyal ally of one or the other. There are times when I'm prepared to hold the line against the assault of "better," but there are also times when "good enough" really is not... "Good enough" is a phrase that ought to be used only when "success" is clearly defined. For example, President Kennedy in his May 25, 1961 address to Congress didn't say, "I believe we need to take humanity to the stars." He said, "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." The latter statement clearly defined success in terms of a deadline and a result: it drew a boundary, outside of which any additional capability at any additional cost could quickly be dismissed as another challenge for another day... 