Also used:
20/20 hindsight,
hindsight is always 20/20
Before we begin to understand this idiom, it will help to understand what 20/20 means and what it has to do with ‘sight’ or vision.
If you have twenty-twenty vision it means you can see clearly. You have what is considered normal vision as measured by an eye test given by an optometrist or ophthalmologist.
Although today optometrists use special devices to measure our eye-sight, they used to use wall charts with rows of letters that became smaller as you reached the bottom of the chart.
The lower the text you were able to read, the better your vision. In 20/20 vision, the first twenty refers to the distance in feet from the eye-test chart and the second twenty refers to the line that a person with average vision can read from that distance. In countries where meters are used instead of feet, this may be 6/6.
20/20 is not perfect vision as it often believed. It is average or ‘normal’ vision. It is actually possible to have better than twenty-twenty vision.
For example, you could have twenty-fifteen vision, meaning you could read a line on the eye chart from 20 feet away that an average person could only read from fifteen feet away.
If you have worse than 20/20 vision, such as 20/30, it means that from 20 feet away you can only read letters that most people can read from 30 feet away. This method of measuring vision was developed during the 1860s.
Meaning of Idiom ‘Hindsight is 20/20’
While you might not have 20/20 sight or vision, everyone has 20/20 hindsight. In English, hindsight means the ability to understand an event or situation after it has happened; to have clarity on the reasons something happened because it has already happened and the reasons are easy to see after the fact. We often talk about the ‘benefit of hindsight.’ Hindsight is 20/20 is an allusion to this benefit.
Hindsight is 20/20 means that it is easy to perfectly and clearly see what should have been done or said in the past. Since we are looking back on what has already occurred, the reasons it occurred are crystal clear even though when those events were unfolding we could not see these reasons and we were confused or unclear about what to do.
In other words, it’s easy to understand why things happened and what we should have done after they have already happened, therefore, hindsight is 20/20.
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Usage
It is important to understand the intent of this idiom. In other words, what are we trying to say when we use it? It is not intended to reference the value of hindsight, but to point out that nobody can predict the future while anyone can look back on past events with perfect clarity. We cannot always know the consequences of our choices but after those consequences have occurred, they may seem obvious and inevitable. So, there is no point in blaming yourself, for example, for things you failed to do just because those things now seem so clear.
A related idiom is Monday-morning quarterback.
Examples Of Use
“I shouldn’t have opened a business with a relative. Oh, well, hindsight is 20/20.”
“Hindsight being 20/20, I would have done things differently in my youth.”
“I know hindsight is always 20/20 but if I could do things over I wouldn’t have stopped playing music.”
Origin
Since the Snellen vision testing chart was developed during the 1860s this idiom must have occured some time after. The earliest known examples in print date from 1949 and 1951.
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