At some point this morning — I’ve already forgotten the context (it’s hot!) — I muttered “Close enough for government work,” and it occurred to me (not for the first time) that I have three such phrases in my quiver, identical in meaning and equivalent in usage (in other words, the choice on any given occasion is essentially random): “close enough for government work,” “close enough for jazz,” and “close enough for rock & roll.” That’s very odd, it seems to me; idioms may have variants, but a given person usually adopts and uses only one. Of course, I may simply not be remembering other similar cases (it’s hot). Wiktionary has close enough for government work and good enough for jazz (a variant I don’t think I’ve heard and wouldn’t use — to me, it sounds more contemptuous than “close enough”); in this Sax on the Web thread, the question is about where the saying “close enough for jazz” comes from, and 1saxman responds:
I never heard it that way before. I know it as ‘Close enough for rock & roll’. And in my ‘day’ career, it was ‘Close enough for government work’. You see, every field of endeavor has it’s own version. As to where the original version started, I have no idea, but it probably was involved with the Army. OTOH, the ‘government work’ version might be the original.
So there you have the result of my languid researches; all thoughts are, as ever, welcome. I’m going to go make some iced tea.
I learned “close enough for government work” in the US Army, 1969-71. I’ve never heard the other two, but I’m not close to the musical performance world.
For me, it’s “good enough for government work,” which has alliteration and dates at least as far back as 1900 — although the usage in that instance seems to have been literal rather than metaphorical
https://books.google.com/books?id=zGSKKMfpNH8C&pg=RA6-PA3&dq=%22good+enough+for+government+work%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjyrOO2nqyHAxXNDzQIHXlMBsAQ6AF6BAgHEAI#v=onepage&q=%22good%20enough%20for%20government%20work%22&f=false
I’ve encountered that often on teh intarwebz – and never another version; had no idea others existed.
The google books corpus has hits for “close enough for Army work” and “… for military work,” but in each case from the 21st century so obviously variations of the older “government work” form. An early instance of that (one of the earliest in the corpus where the metadata as to the year of publication is not suspicious) can be found in the transcript of the spaceflight of Aurora 7 in 1962, where the astronaut (Scott Carpenter) says during his third orbit of the Earth “I overshot. Stand by.” To which the relevant guy on the ground (which at that point was someone at Muchea Tracking Station in Western Australia) says “That’s probably close enough for government work.” It seems reasonably likely that the speaker on the ground was fellow U.S. astronaut Deke Slayton, who had been deployed to Muchea for the occasion. Slayton, in terms of influences on his idiolect, had joined the Army Air Corps at age 18 in 1942, returned to civilian life in 1946, but then come back into the newly-founded Air Force during the Korean War and remained variously an Air Force officer or a civilian NASA employee for the next three decades.
I know the “jazz” variant well but not the “rock” variant, although the google ngram viewer assures me that it is documented. Indeed, for decades I think I have mentally misconstrued this album title https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Enough_for_Rock_%27n%27_Roll as being about “close” in the physical-proximity sense, i.e. “in your face,” rather than being about “close” in the “maybe not exactly in tune but don’t worry about it” sense.
as being about “close” in the physical-proximity sense, i.e. “in your face,” rather than being about “close” in the “maybe not exactly in tune but don’t worry about it” sense.
That possibility would never have occurred to me!
On further reflection, the “in your face” misreading may also have been cued by the cover art (by the Hipgnosis firm because of course it was), which gives the viewer the vantage point of a hypothetical rock star in the back of a limousine which has been surrounded by a crowd of adoring-and/or-menacing fans with their faces pressed right up against the windows and windshield. You can enlarge the image found at this link to get a better sense of it: https://www.discogs.com/release/1423991-Nazareth-Close-Enough-For-Rock-N-Roll
I think I learned it from a Heinlein juvenile (The Door into Summer ?) …
Here’s an interesting physical-proximity use: “Jazz on the Waterfront, well not actually the waterfront, but close enough for jazz, is the way the Half Note advertises its policy of jazz attractions.” From a 1958 issue of The Metronome, which at that point in its lengthy run as a music magazine was largely jazz-focused. The Half Note was at the time located at 289 Hudson St. in lower Manhattan, on the corner of Spring St. Hudson St. at that point is parallel to and three blocks east of West St., which is at that latitude the waterfront street that has nothing on its other side other than piers jutting out into the river.
But this seems like a playful use of what was already a fixed phrase where “close” did not mean physical proximity.
Same goes for the cover illustration.
“Close Enough for Jazz” was a 1969 album by vibraphonist Johhny Lytle. It is also the name of a 2012 Van Morrison song. Stan Freberg used it in an aside in his 1956 send-off of Hearbreak Hotel.
“Just about close enough for Jazz” appears as early as a 1937 issue of The Billboard, if the GBooks metadata are right. It was used in 2001 in The Gilmore Girls (someone asking someone else if they parked close enough to the curb), but by then it was obscure enough that auxiliary web sites had to explain it to befuddled watchers.
Do horseshoes and hand grenades warrant a mention here?
None of these ring any bells for me.
This January 1960 quote…
…suggests (a) it was already proverbial then and (b) Wiktionary’s assertion “Originally nonironic (meaning good enough to meet especially high standards); later evolved to mean good enough, though only barely.” is spurious
@Jack Morava Yes, I definitely associate it with Heinlein, though I wouldn’t be able to pin it down to a specific work
Hmmm. If this were the classic 1970’s game show Match Game (starring Gene Rayburn) and I were seated between Charles Nelson Reilly and Brett Somers, I’m entirely certain I’d have answered the prompt “Close enough for _______” with “government work.” But my father was a career military officer, and I very surely heard that variant very frequently…perhaps even weekly.
Wiktionary’s assertion “Originally nonironic (meaning good enough to meet especially high standards); later evolved to mean good enough, though only barely.” is spurious
Yes, I was very suspicious of that.
I’ve always used “close enough for corporate work.”
Various stories I’ve seen on the webz, all easily checked in Google Books:
— “The expression used to imply high quality”: yes. The Pottery Gazette (London), 1920 (here) has an ad for Lactocol glue, “It’s good enough for government work.”
The Russian Review (London), 1912 (here): “But what is Stolypin? A good fellow. That is not enough for government work.” (By Sergius Syromantikov. Translated from Russian?)
— “But then it became ironic”: no. It was so early on. The Dental Cosmos: A Monthly Record Of Dental Science (Philadelphia), 1900 (here), in an ad for gold foil: “The underlying foundation off all these Foils in the Government mint bar, which is 0.997 to 0.998¾ fine. That is good enough for government work, but it is not pure enough for our purposes.”
— “The expression originated in Canada in the 1900s”: no. See above. There is a Canadian example from 1906, though, in the Debates of the House of Commons (here): “It seems rather peculiar that although White’s cement has been considered good enough for government work and has been purchased by the department for $2.25 a barrel, […]”
— “It became pejorative after WW2”: no. See above.
“Close enough” etc. Does not appear until the 1950s, though, with the negative meaning.
the only version i heard as a kid was “close enough for folk music”, specifically about guitar tuning, from my folk-guitar-playing mother (who has some flavor of perfect pitch). i don’t know that i’ve ever run into “close enough for jazz” in the wild, and that variation certainly sounds actively dismissive/hostile to my ear in a way that the folk and rock versions don’t.
in some SF novel(s) – if i remember right, suzette haden elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy – there’s an actual government agency called Government Work, which is massively ineffectual at its official task, producing a significant number of dead children in the process.
I am close to the musical performance world, although more the rock side, and I am not familiar with either “close enough for jazz” or “close enough for rock´n`roll” as general idioms. It is very likely I have heard people say “close enough for rock´n`roll” while tuning an instrument, but I would not have interpreted that as an idiom, but rather more or less literally.
I am very familiar with “close enough for government work”. I don’t have any military in my family but I also read a fair amount of Heinlein when I was young.
I cited Heinlein’s `Door into Summer’ bc it’s an early account of the DARPA model for research & development : a sort of postdoc doing cutting-edge work followed by a return to civilian life where the new ideas are developed for general use.
It’s also interesting because of the attention to alcoholism and the concern with romance across age-grades. There is (IMO) a lot of stuff in his early work that doesn’t seem to have garnered much attention, \eg the personality transfer in `Double Star’, sex and amphetamines in `Puppet Masters’, the Martian weed plantations in `Number of the Beast’, not to mention Jonathan Hoag…
While I agree that the phrase feels congruent with themes in various of Heinlein’s works, I’m here to tell you that the “advanced search” function applied to the google books corpus reports:
‘No results found for “enough for government work” inauthor:Heinlein.’
Now, maybe the corpus does not include accurately digitized texts of 100% of the Heinlein juveniles. Or there are metadata glitches. Or maybe Heinlein used different phrasing to express the same concept.
i don’t know that i’ve ever run into “close enough for jazz” in the wild, and that variation certainly sounds actively dismissive/hostile to my ear in a way that the folk and rock versions don’t.
It probably sounds that way because you haven’t run into it. I’m pretty sure it’s used exactly the same way the “rock´n`roll” and “folk music” ones are, as affectionate joshing. I’ve never heard it as dismissive/hostile.
@JWB thanks, I was shooting my mouth off, don’t have a copy to check and am happy to take your word for it.
Taken in a vacuum outside the context of a familiar stock phrase I would agree that “close enough for jazz” would indeed come off as hostile in a way that the “rock” or “folk” variants don’t, because in the jazz context unlike those other contexts, sloppiness or amateurishness or imprecision is not generally thought endearing or a badge of authenticity. A note that “sounds wrong” in a jazz context is instead presumed to have been selected deliberately for a particular outre harmonic effect, rather than being random. That said, I don’t have the impression that jazz people familiar with the idiom spend any time or energy being mad about it or even self-consciously eschew it themselves. The 1958 quote from a jazz-oriented magazine that I gave in a prior comment presumably would not have playfully used the phrase if it were likely to irk jazz-fan readers.
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The underlying foundation off all these Foils in the Government mint bar, which is 0.997 to 0.998¾ fine. That is good enough for government work, but it is not pure enough for our purposes.
That doesn’t seem ironic. It just seems to be using the phrase with its literal meaning, in a context where the gold needs to be purer than that used by the government.
0.998¾?! — I would prefer 0.99875 or 99⅞% or 998¾‰ or 998.75‰
I can believe “good enough for government work” was initially complimentary, but “close enough for government work” sounds like a jocular riff akin to “cheap at half the price”.
@jack m.: FWIW I wasn’t trying to debunk you – I read and enjoyed all of the Heinlein juveniles many decades ago and was hoping to find a quote showing his use of the phrase in context!
@JWB no problem at all. [I may be over-interested in RH, but even though his writing was classed as for juveniles, his recurring concerns seem interesting and frequently quite subtle to me.]
J.W., Jazz musicians use a lot of “blue” notes and slurs. Certainly to a classicly trained musician a lot of jazz sounds harmonically imprecise. And it used to be worse. Back when jazz was a somewhat disreputable music played in night clubs, speakeasies, brothels, etc. poorly tuned pianos were probably the norm, the bass was more of a rhythym instrument than something you could hear, the sax and trumpet players were too loud, and then at least in bebop, tried to play faster rather than precisely. Not hard to see where that idiom came from originally.
I’m surprised “close enough for punk rock” never gained currency. I bet it did in certain circles. In fact, of all the musical “close enough for”s that is the only expression that activates some vague recollection in my aging brain of being a phrase people I knew used to say.
@Vanya: Sure, someone with certain expectations fixed by another musical style’s conventions may find certain aspects of a jazz performance imprecise-sounding. That just means they don’t understand what they’re listening to. E.g. a “blue” note may not fit into the closed set of pitches a well-tempered clavier is tuned to be able to generate, but that doesn’t mean it’s a random pitch as opposed to a deliberately chosen one.
And of course there are finer divides – I was just listening to the somewhat lo-fi recording of Ornette Coleman playing at Coltrane’s funeral in ’67 and he’s doing things that some jazz saxophonists of an earlier generation (Ben Webster? Herschel Evans if he’d still been alive?) might well have denigrated as amateurish or off-pitch. But he’s not doing them at random!
@Vanya: Sure, someone with certain expectations fixed by another musical style’s conventions may find certain aspects of a jazz performance imprecise-sounding.
Methinks your expectations have been set by recordings that have been polished to a fare-thee-well, like the evergreen Kind of Blue. If you go out and hear jazz in its natural setting, you will hear a fair number of pitches that were probably not deliberately chosen. This is, of course, one reason musicians often dislike live recordings. But to the listener, it’s all close enough for jazz.
I read the beginning of this post too quickly, caught the parenthetical “it’s hot!,” and assumed the “close” in the phrases meant hot and stuffy. There’s hot jazz, and government (road) work is common during the dog days of summer, so it roughly made sense.
Might start misusing these this way.
Not in the “good enough for X” category, but expressing somewhat the same “well-enough-done” sentiment, is a phrase I heard while working as a glazier’s helper years ago:
“Can’t see it from my house.”
knew the ‘close enough for jazz’ from the Van Morrison song, ‘good enough for government work’ is one I heard in the Army during the early 80s.
Another variant I’ve heard in Wyoming rural bars, ‘good enough for the girls I go out with’. Any girl hearing that usually responds with a creative insult of their own, though not in any pattern I’ve been able to discern yet.
The 1937 “… for jazz” usage was noted upthread, but then what’s odd is that there are no further appearances in the google books corpus for almost another 20 years. Maybe this is a deficiency of the particular corpus and different texts out there (newspapers or ephemera) would show more continuous use? But the rise to fairly more continuous appearance in the late Fifties and early Sixties is interesting partly because that actually follows the timeline of the rise of people thinking, rather self-consciously and sometimes defensively, of jazz as Serious Music,* which creates some of the tension referred to above. The phrase might have more easily become idiomatic earlier on, and perhaps it did without leaving many footprints in this particular corpus.
That’s not to say that the earlier jazz musicians themselves weren’t serious about their work, just as would be true in other non-artsy vernacular styles. For example, if you imagine a guy up in the East Tennessee hills in the 1920’s who was scratching out a full-time living playing the banjo or fiddle he was probably reasonably serious about his vocation and would not particularly appreciate the “close enough for folk music” notion, which reflects a point of view more likely to be found in the sort of college-town scenesters and hangers-on who began proliferating in the lateish Fifties.
*For the record, I’m not thinking of stuff like _Kind of Blue_ but of the work of dudes like Monk or Ornette which philistines would dismiss as sounding weird or off.
“Music or Poetry”, in The Musical Quarterly, 1923 (here): ‘What then?—Are we not to think when we listen to music? Are we to suspend all activity of the mind? Are we to sink to the level of sensation? This is well enough for “jazz,” the intellectualist will say, but for Beethoven and Brahms — never!’
a “blue” note may not fit into the closed set of pitches a well-tempered clavier is tuned to be able to generate
Bebop performers often claim to be channeling Bach. And you’d be pretty astonished at the dissonances in the WTC, more so in the Kunst der Fuge or the Goldberg Variations. Indeed (it’s been argued) that’s “well-tempered” not “equal-tempered” because Bach re-tuned the strings for each piece/each key, to get just the right crunchiness.
(WTC was not intended for public performance in the sense of playing through all the pieces in one sitting.)
but for Beethoven …
Pshaw! and pshaw again! Famously Beethoven was very sloppy about honouring the notes on the page; and all for what felt right in the moment. (Probably the huge public performances of half a dozen major works all at once when he could scrape an orchestra together didn’t help with the effective rehearsal and accuracy.)
Precision is not what he’s talking about. His “intellectualist” strawman is arguing that jazz is purely sensual, whereas enjoying B&B is more cerebral.
Are we not to think when we listen to music? Are we to suspend all activity of the mind? Are we to sink to the level of sensation?
Works for me …
What’s so bad about the “level of sensation” anyways?
Actually, the perpetrator of these silly words seems to have fallen into the trap of supposing that all “thinking” is conscious. They probably thought that it always involves language, too. A strange view for a musician, or even for a mere music critic.
They evidently also imagine that “sensation” is a purely passive experience.
enjoying B&B is more cerebral.
Then double-pshaw! and treble-pshaw! This is the sort of musical snob who looks down their nose at Rachmaninov, I suppose. Pompous a***-hole.
If music doesn’t work at the “level of sensation” (including listening to WTC), ‘activity of the mind’ is pointless. There’s a Alkan whose music is intensely cerebral, yet entirely devoid of anything but the most superficial “sensation”. (And I don’t get why a very competent interpreter like Ronald Smith has wasted so much of his life on trying to revive him.)
Oh, bookworm trivia:
Is it better for cerebration to be crushed by a bookcase or a falling piano? The Hattery is where I expect to find the answer to life’s conundrums.
for my mom, at least, “close enough for folk music” is partly an acknowledgement of the style/genre-specific valuation of certain kinds of dissonance, which make the kind of tuning that a classical orchestra uses actively wrong, rather than an ideal that’s not being met.
(this isn’t unusual: you can almost always tell when a classical player is sitting in with yiddish musicians, because they very rarely have any facility working with un-notated dissonance and what the ethnomusicologists sometimes call a “broad unison” approach to tuning; similarly, some of the worst performances i’ve seen in musical theater have been from extremely skilled singers whose lack of genre/style competence comes out in being note-precise in the wrong ways, at the wrong times – and each of these spheres has its own, non-interchangeable, approach to these things.*)
i’m sure a lot of why “close enough for jazz” rings dismissive to my ear is that i’ve never heard any of the jazz players i know use it, while i’ve heard plenty of (u.s. tradition) folk musicians and one or two rockers use the parallel phrases.
.
* this kind of lack is often less immediately audible when there aren’t musicians who’re actually skilled in the genre/style playing, which is why those examples came to mind rather than, say, an opera singer’s album of jazz standards.
I found a few occurrences of „close enough for punk rock“ on line, almost all fairly literal in reference to guitars – setting intonation, using effect boxes, or this quote about modifying a guitar amplifier: ” i know i have some 6.8uF caps, which would give me right around 61Hz. close enough for punk rock, as my father would say“
“Close enough for jazz” I think has an element that jazz musicians know how to bend notes. Even if the instrument is not perfectly in tune, the musician can bend the note into tune. With the suggestion that classical musicians don’t know how to do that, which I think is not really true. But sliding into a note is more acceptable in jazz than classical.
The usual context for this phrase is when you find out your instrument is out of tune and you have to go on stage in three minutes. You tune as best you can in the time available and then utter the phrase, implying there might be a few little scoops and slides in the performance.
That sounds exactly right to me.
Alkan, ‘devoid of anything but the most superficial “sensation”’? Counter-pshaw. The Symphonie and Concerto from his op39 rival the best 19th-century piano sonatas, and Quasi-Faust from his Grande Sonata rivals Liszt at his most Faustian. If his music is good enough for not just Ronald Smith but also Marc-André Hamelin, it’s good enough for me.
“Close enough for jazz” is definitely the canonical version among every genre of musicians that I have tuned up and played with, and it was always jocular. Any other version would come across as an equally jocular reference to the jazz version. Moreover, the overwhelming predominance of the “jazz” version comes in spite of the fact that I have played very little jazz; so when I’m thinking of someone saying that while tuning their strings, I’m thinking mostly of classical, folk, klezmer, or bluegrass players. maidhc is also almost certainly right that part of the reason is that jazz references are or were most common is actually musical, having to do with bending notes being more normal in that genre that others. (However, while it is probably true that classical wind players are not typically that skilled at bending notes to deal with intonation problems, it’s a necessary and not difficult skill for violin-family players. Viols, with their gut strings, can go out of tune quite quickly, but that’s easy to correct for with a slight shift in hand position, except when playing chords.)
It’s also the case that some people really don’t like hearing tuning described as “close enough for jazz.” In one classical string ensemble I played with, there was one guy who sometimes said it, and another person who didn’t like it, I think because she felt it was disrespectful or unserious. So I started occasionally describing my own tuning as “close enough for Schoenberg.” (She did not appear to get the joke.)
I’ve never heard “close enough for government work”.
I was expecting to see “near enough” in the comments, but no.
There is the expression “near enough is good enough”, which was the target of a campaign in Australia a decade or two ago — which pointed out that “near enough” isn’t “good enough”.
From Mark Liberman’s Log post Capitalization in the constitution?: “Thus, the National Archives version [of the Constitution] is probably good enough for government work.”
I googled “near enough isn’t good enough” and found this:
Close Enough.
Language Hat
https://languagehat.com › close-enough
16 July 2024 — … near enough” isn’t “good enough”. languagehat says. July 24, 2024 at 10:54 am. From Mark Liberman’s Log post Capitalization in the …
But I didn’t find anything at this post other than my comment. Is Google getting that sloppy?
I don’t understand. That is the last part of your comment from July 22. What else were you expecting to find?
Yes, I’m confused too. Wherein the slop?
I remember composing a longer version of the following last week, but then things happened. Or maybe I posted in the wrong thread. Anyway, nærved og næsten slår ingen mand af hesten is the proverb expressing the sentiment of “close is not good enough” in Danish.
“Jazz mavens” apparently believe Dizzy Gillespie came up with “close enough to jazz”, as I just discovered on a thread on BlueSky. No evidence I can see that he invented the phrase, but it is documented that he liked to use it and got laughs from the audience. See this article:
https://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/aca_centers_hitchcock/AMR_42-2_Suzuki.pdf
At the university I have more often heard this expressed as: “good enough for graduate work”.
The slop:
“near enough” isn’t “good enough”. languagehat says
I looked right through this post and its comments and I couldn’t find anywhere that LH had made this comment. Of course it was a comment that I myself had made, but to state that “languagehat” said it seems sloppy and misleading to me. It should at least have said that a comment at languagehat said it. Lots of comments at LH have said strange things (one said that a particular expression set her gaydar running, or something like that), but that’s definitely not what “languagehat” said.
Google did not state that languagehat made the comment; it reproduced the contents on the page, only removing the linebreaks/formatting between the end of your comment and the beginning of the next one, which begins with “languagehat says”. Google’s search snippets have always run together comments like this; I’ve seen it for years. I’m surprised you’ve never noticed it before.
As far as I know, there is no way to tell just from a search snippet whether it comes from the post or the comments, and never has been. Google isn’t set up to distinguish them.
No, I’ve never noticed it before because I’ve never had occasion to search for snippets from blog comments.