I'm looking for a term or a phrase that may or may not exist

April 26, 2024 8:37 AM

What is it called, when you have a process/method of doing something, that gets passed down, where it turns out that part of that process/method was due to limitations/situations at the time, and is not important to actual process of doing the thing at all?

I think it may be clearer if I use some examples

"This is my Nana's gravy recipe. It's important to stir it only once an hour, and it should simmer all day." - turns out the only reason Nana stirred it once an hour is because she was addicted to QVC so she would only get up and stir the pot when they switched sales host. Turns out the gravy tastes just as good if you stir it more or fewer times than once an hour.

"This is how we do this fiddly method in the lab. You add a little of A, then add B, then add more A, then add C, then mix everything together." - turns out that this method used to be run on machine that could only add so much volume of anything at a time, so A got split up into multiple addition. There was ultimately no reason not just add all of A, B and C together.

I've been casually asking people irl, at the closest I've gotten is "tradition" and "vestigial step" but neither really capture what I trying to express. Can you think of anything that would describe this better?

posted by lizjohn to Writing & Language (30 answers total)

"Legacy", perhaps?
posted by SPrintF at 8:40 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

Best answer: I have heard this called the Pot Roast Principle.
posted by Jeanne at 8:45 AM on April 26 [35 favorites]

This probably isn't what you're looking for, but your question makes me think of "cargo cult thinking".
posted by cider at 8:46 AM on April 26 [13 favorites]

Sometimes this is called The Pot Roast Principle, after the canonical example of the woman who cuts the ends off the pot roast, because that's how her mother did it, who did it because that's how her mother did it, who did it because she used to have a very small oven/roast pan/whatever.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:46 AM on April 26 [7 favorites]

The classic example of what you’re talking about is this story about cutting off the end of a roast, which you can find versions of all over the internet.
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:46 AM on April 26

This is also related to the idea of a Thomasson. The same idea of something that was once useful and important but now is neither.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:03 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]

The evolutionary idea of a "spandrel" gets at this a bit.
posted by sagc at 9:03 AM on April 26 [8 favorites]

I like “vestigial step” as has been suggested to you, because it an activity which was either added as part of random noise and then retained - or something which once served a purpose but no longer does. The idea of a cargo cult is similar but it is more related to performing a vestigial step in the hope of getting a particular outcome.
posted by rongorongo at 9:07 AM on April 26 [5 favorites]

Another related idea is Chesterton's Fence, where part of the process doesn't have an obvious purpose or effect, and might have been included due to limitations at the original time. But alternately, it might have a non-obvious purpose which is still necessary. Therefore it's important to understand the purpose of the part before you remove it.

To borrow your example above: maybe if A is added in all at once, the mixture will heat up too quickly.
posted by What is E. T. short for? at 9:14 AM on April 26 [6 favorites]

Depending on the situation, this could be called a "folk explanation": there's a phenomenon you (or someone) don't really understand, so you make up a plausible but incorrect explanation for it (see also: folk etymology).
posted by adamrice at 9:17 AM on April 26

"cargo cult thinking"

Came to say this. Specifically, I see this term used in computer programming to refer to something included in code because the programmer is unthinkingly following an example, without understanding its origin or (maybe no longer existent) purpose.
posted by staggernation at 9:27 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Path dependency, lock-in and technology treadmills all relate to how inefficiencies become ingrained in a particular process. So the pot roast, and all recipes really, are path dependent as each step is followed by the next, one at time. The size of the actual pan or oven is not included, as it's part of the expected shared cultural norm and so reality deviates from original working plan.

'Ox-weeding' is an example of lock-in, where 'innefficiently' wide cotton plant spacing is locked in because the farmers use large animals to weed their crops. I put inefficient in quotes intentionally - because what is efficiency or what your metric of "important" can be totally arbitrary. It's worth quoting the paper on 'ox weeding' here: "This cultivation system is efficient and advantageous for cash-poor farmers. It relies on household labor and work exchange; draft animals that may be owned, rented, or borrowed; and simple familiar tools." Herbicide might yield better crops returns, but ox-weeding can be bootstrapped from modest means and features less external dependencies.

The example of mixing in batches being unnecessary might represent an "improvement" in the material processing. However the new process might also be something that itself is totally dependent on that updated machine. What if there is only one source for that new machine? Many airlines are stuck in a technology treadmill with Boeing because the airline has invested in just one system. So when airlines has trained all its pilots on just one type of machine, all the mechanics, all in the service of maximum efficiency, they got saddled with the 737 Max. Getting off the Boeing tech treadmill was too expensive right up until the treadmill just broke down.
posted by zenon at 9:36 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Best answer: In case you're wondering one term for an opposite situation, going through a process in order to clean things up and remove these vestigial steps, is refactoring.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 9:46 AM on April 26 [10 favorites]

It’s also the critical anecdote that launches Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s personal finance/self-help classic “Your Money or Your Life” which is worth reading no matter how out of date because the point of the book isn’t financial management; it’s “Why do you think what you think?”

I mention it because they talk a lot about this incident and this type of thinking on the book and at some point they might describe it technically but I don’t remember exactly what.
posted by toodleydoodley at 10:30 AM on April 26

"that's the way we've always done it"
posted by canoehead at 10:58 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Chesterton's Fence. Levi's Onion. Primo Levi has a number of stories from industrial chemistry including one one where the recipe for varnish required the addition of a cut onion to each batch. It descended from long long ago when the temperature of boiling linseed could best be determined by how quickly an onion browned.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:58 AM on April 26 [4 favorites]

I would probably use the expression "received wisdom" to describe something like this.
posted by jquinby at 11:27 AM on April 26

Cruft.
posted by dusty potato at 11:52 AM on April 26 [2 favorites]

I like vestigial step, but until today I would have called that an artifact.
posted by juliapangolin at 12:40 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Wow, a LOT of good answers. I just want to add that I heard the "cutting the ends off the pot roast" rule originally as "breaking the pasta in half". And also, once you step into the IT world, there are SO MANY unnecessary actions and rules being followed that are actually "legacy" and no longer necessary or even best practice that it is somewhat astounding. And then there is comedic but true YouTube video about the rules you are supposed to follow when making a Power Point presentation!
posted by forthright at 12:40 PM on April 26 [2 favorites]

This is not an exact map to your question, but skeuomorphs are a fairly related concept, where an object retains now-useless designs from an older version.
posted by nakedmolerats at 1:14 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

I don’t know of a specific term — although ‘legacy’ would be my vote — but when this type of thing came up in my old career The Parable of the Five Monkeys was frequently referenced one way or another.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:56 PM on April 26

Are you kidding me? I skimmed this thread, and seeing no mention of the Five Monkeys story, I went off to go research it (lots of other results here), and then came back and found that TMNL answered it just before me :)

My old boss would use the shorthand "it's a banana" to refer to things that we do but we don't remember why we do them.
posted by intermod at 7:15 PM on April 26 [2 favorites]

The deeply misogynistic 'Old wive's tales' was pretty standard for this kind of thing for a long time, and I find it gratifying that it’s so outmoded no one else even mentioned it.
posted by jamjam at 11:07 PM on April 26

It’s not perfect, but another phrase related to this situation is “the temporary becomes permanent.” You make a solution that works to solve your problem given your constraints at the moment, and then you keep using that hacky solution because you know it works.
posted by Schismatic at 12:04 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

The Parable of the Five Monkeys was frequently referenced one way or another
The Five Monkeys problem is itself an interesting commentary on vestigial steps. It would appear that that no such experiment was ever conducted and that the story appeared in a 1990s business book and has since been passed along without its origin being unquestioned. The number of monkeys is vestigial too: the experiment as cited would have needed 10, housed in at least 2 enclosures, and thus would have been very costly to perform. To actually make the point, three monkeys in the ladder cage would have been sufficient - two being enough to overcome a third’s climbing attempts. However if you ask people “have you ever heard about the three monkeys?” in a business presentation they will say “of course I fucking have” - which is the cold water shower in the anecdote.
posted by rongorongo at 1:51 AM on April 27 [3 favorites]

In the computer world, "legacy code" is a program written in the forgotton past, but still in use. Maybe none of the present staff is fluent in the the computer language used, maybe that language is no longer supported. No one dares touch it.

In a different context, the width between rails of railroad track, called the guage, is certainly a legacy from more than 100 years ago. Which reminds one of the well-debunked story that the guage is actually a legacy from cart tracks in the middle ages or before.

I think "vestigial" is the word.
posted by SemiSalt at 4:52 AM on April 27 [1 favorite]

At the zoo I volunteered at, the giraffes got a nightly drink of nice warm water. It turned out that this was because once, when a new giraffe had arrived and was settling in, the vet had said to give her a warm drink that evening, and it got written on the wall chart "warm water bucket 6pm" and then the next night the new crew followed the same thing and pretty soon it was just "I dunno, it's just what we do" and by then of course how absolute DARE you not give her the warm water drinky for bedtime.
posted by The otter lady at 10:07 AM on April 27 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: This is great. Thank you all very much. I knew I had heard of the Pot Roast Principle before, and I think that's closest to what I was going for.
posted by lizjohn at 10:35 AM on April 29 [1 favorite]

For software stuff, I've often heard and used "for historical reasons" (or it's more tongue in cheek variant "for hysterical reasons).

Though I would say "for historical reasons" has a stronger implication that the odd part of the process is still required. But not always. The implication of "for historical reasons" is there is some part of the system or process that is outdated but hasn't been changed, possibly for ludicrous reasons. The more ludicrous the more likely "for hysterical reasons" is fitting.
posted by alikins at 2:17 PM on May 8