Quote:
Originally Posted by mrbrklyn  That seemed to be mint tradition until the Morgan Dollar.
Ruben |
Well it's a tradition I'm glad they changed! There's no inherent value in tradition for its own sake(not saying it's a bad thing, just not automatically a good thing. Just because it's been done a certain way for a long time does not automatically justify continuing to do it that way.).
Speaking of tradition, reminds me of a story one of my professors told me... appropriately enough, he tought a critical thinking class.
He was at his wife's family's house for Thanksgiving. His wife was preparing the ham. For some reason, she cut the ends off the ham before putting it in the pan. He asked why, and she just answered "I don't know why... I've always done it that way, it's how my mother taught me to do it. Ask her why."
So he asked his mother-in-law why she taught her daughter to cut the ends off the ham. She answered pretty much the same way... "My mother taught me to do that. I don't really know why. Ask her."
So he asked his wife's grandmother, she was finally able to shed light on the subject: "When we first came to this country, we didn't have much money yet, so we couldn't afford too much fancy cookware. The only pan we could afford was pretty small... a ham just wouldn't fit in it, so to make it fit, I cut the ends off. Myt husband got a good job, and eventually we got a new house and cookware and such, but I was just in such a habit of cutting the ends off the ham that I just kept doing it... and my daughter picked that up from me, I guess."
So there you go, that's how tradition works lol... it starts with a perfectly logical and practical reason, becomes habit, and gets passed on... until people forget why they originally did it in the first place and the original reason no longer applies, but they keep up the practice in the name of tradition!
