What is "parsimony"

Usage examples of "parsimony".

With utmost brevity and parsimony, Tolstoy informs us that the Ilyches had several children, that more than one of them died, that the experience of sick or fragile babies, of difficult nurturing, was a hard, disagreeable experience, an experience for which Ilych is unequipped.

Needless to say, this proletarianization of the writer is granted only with parsimony, the more completely to be destroyed afterwards.

The young ladies had long been repining in secret at the parsimony of a prudent father, which kept down all their elegant aspirings.

There, Abdul, though with some parsimony, offered their guest a touch of green honey, on the tip of a spoon, and they shared another drop.

He was apt, when thinking over his affairs, to attribute all this to the fears and hesitation and parsimony of Sexty Parker.

This parsimony of explanation parallels that of science, which moved from Aristotle's many special cases to general laws, like gravitation and classical mechanics, to explain the seen world.

In short, what I’m talking about is Project Parsimony writ large: the discontinuation of an experiment that cost far too much to set up and hasn’t paid off.

Among mercs, the Lady Renaeka was notorious for her parsimony, a hardfistedness which didn't seem to extend to her dresses—the pounced green silk that made her stand out from the soberly dressed Councilors like a peacock among ravens must have cost seventy gold pieces, several times what one of the dyers in her employ would have made in his life.

That's really all the law of parsimony comes down to, you know, Robin: we prefer the simplest theory that fits all the facts, but nobody has ever been able to prove that it is a real law of nature.

These laws have therefore a certain utility in this respect also, yet it is easily seen that they regard the parsimony of causes, the manifoldness of effects, and an affinity between the parts of nature arising from thence, as both rational and natural, so that these principles carry their recommendation direct, and not only as aids towards a proper method of studying nature.

Although intricate, this model successfully employs the Principle of Parsimony, since, if the concept of the intermediate artifact is removed, either God or man is responsible for the vast evil and suffering in the world, a theory that is objectionable.

There is a sort of informal principle of parsimony that cuts through convoluted explanations.

Here, too, reason presupposes a systematical unity of diverse powers, because particular laws of nature are subject to more general laws, and parsimony in principles is not only considered as an economical rule of reason, but as an essential law of nature.