| ▲ | w4der a day ago |
| Where did the "ants" saying come from? i've kept seeing it here and there after the hacks to Hugging Face and others. |
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| ▲ | Telemakhos a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| It's likely a variation on the saying that, if you see two cockroaches, there are more. Here's a page with that saying from 2013: https://www.weekand.com/home-garden/article/see-two-cockroac... |
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| ▲ | jacobolus a day ago | parent [-] | | I couldn't find any examples of this in a full-text book search, but besides some technical works about insects, and some material about noah's ark, I did find, from 1942: > In the course of an experimental way, down in the depths of a science building, a beaker full of fermented sugar is left on a shelf. Sometime later one of the experimenters returned to the scene ... to find two cockroaches in the beaker, one of which had a family of about a dozen—the other had drowned itself in rum. AND WHO WOULDN'T IN THE FACE OF SUCH OVERWHELMING RESPONSIBILITIES. |
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| ▲ | spullara a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535 |
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| ▲ | hamdingers a day ago | parent | next [-] | | This is a paraphrase of the less technical-sounding: "if you find two ants in the kitchen, you don't have a two-ant problem" which I definitely heard my mom say in the 90s (about actual ants, not metaphorically). | |
| ▲ | saaaaaam a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I just did a quick search and concluded the same. I wonder if he got it from somewhere before. If you have Twitter account please ask him! |
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| ▲ | saaaaaam a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A fortune cookie I suspect. More seriously, I was also curious. A quick search seems to say the earliest recent source is https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535 |
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| ▲ | anigbrowl a day ago | parent [-] | | Nonsense, this is just folk wisdom. Ask your parents. | | |
| ▲ | swiftcoder a day ago | parent [-] | | I have a feeling this one falls in the same category as "sweet summer child", which, while technically as old as the hills, only hit critical mass after game of thrones popularised it |
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| ▲ | lazyasciiart a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| People say it in real life about things that are often present in groups and are hard to spot. I most associate it with cockroaches and bedbugs. |
