familiarity breeds contempt
familiarity breeds contempt
Repeated exposure to someone or something often creates a contentious relationship. A: "Those two teams have built up quite a rivalry over the years." B: "They play in the same division, and familiarity breeds contempt." I've been stuck with Larry in the office all week, and I'm afraid they're right that familiary breeds contempt.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
Prov. People do not respect someone they know well enough to know his or her faults. The movie star doesn't let anyone get to know him, because he knows that familiarity breeds contempt.
familiarity breeds contempt
Long experience of someone or something can make one so aware of the faults as to be scornful. For example, Ten years at the same job and now he hates it-familiarity breeds contempt. The idea is much older, but the first recorded use of this expression was in Chaucer's Tale of Melibee (c. 1386).
familiarity breeds contempt
If you say that familiarity breeds contempt, you mean that if you know someone or something very well, you can easily become bored with them and stop treating them with respect. Of course, it's often true that familiarity breeds contempt, that we're attracted to those who seem so different from those we know at home. It is second-year drivers — when familiarity breeds contempt for road rules — that are the problem. Note: Other nouns are sometimes used instead of contempt. Familiarity breeds inattention. Typically, family members are so convinced they know what another family member is going to say that they don't bother to listen.
familiarity breeds conˈtempt
(saying) you have little respect, liking, etc. for somebody/something that you know too well: George’s father is regarded by everyone as a great artist, but George doesn’t think he is. Familiarity breeds contempt!familiarity breeds contempt
Overexposure to or knowing something or someone too thoroughly can turn liking into hostility. The idea behind this expression dates from ancient times—the Roman writer Publilius Syrus used it about 43 b.c.—and approximately twelve hundred years later Pope Innocent III repeated it, also in Latin. The first record of it in English appeared in Nicholas Udall’s translation of Erasmus’s sayings (1548): “Familiaritye bringeth contempt.” Later writers often stated it with humor or irony, notably Mark Twain in his unpublished diaries (Notebooks, ca. 1900): “Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.”