Reeksta
Green Belt
In general I love the conversations I have with people in the martial arts community, both face to face and online. However, certain phrases I hear repeated ad nauseum wind me up a little, such as:
"[Insert name of martial art here] was created to allow smaller, weaker people to beat larger, stronger opponents" - of course it was. All martial arts were. To my knowledge no MA was created with the purpose of allowing bigger people to beat up those smaller than themselves.
"I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6" - usually used to justify a needlessly violent response to a situation. The problem I have with this is that it's such a grotesque oversimplification. 99% of situations will not require you to kill someone else in order to save your own life (unless you do a particularly dangerous job, in which case fair enough). Personally I would rather be neither dead nor on trial for murder/attempted murder/GBH and believe that it should almost always be possible to achieve this.
Are there any martial arts cliches like this which annoy you?
"[Insert name of martial art here] was created to allow smaller, weaker people to beat larger, stronger opponents" - of course it was. All martial arts were. To my knowledge no MA was created with the purpose of allowing bigger people to beat up those smaller than themselves.
"I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6" - usually used to justify a needlessly violent response to a situation. The problem I have with this is that it's such a grotesque oversimplification. 99% of situations will not require you to kill someone else in order to save your own life (unless you do a particularly dangerous job, in which case fair enough). Personally I would rather be neither dead nor on trial for murder/attempted murder/GBH and believe that it should almost always be possible to achieve this.
Are there any martial arts cliches like this which annoy you?