the.com/belt and braces
Redundancy as a lifestyle: trusting nothing, not even the thing holding your trousers up.
means An approach that uses two independent safeguards for the same risk, so that if one fails, the other still works.
from A literal British image: a belt and a pair of braces (suspenders) are each sufficient on their own to hold trousers up, so wearing both is pure redundancy. The phrase moved from clothing into general use in the UK sometime in the 20th century as a figure of speech for excessive, overlapping caution — doing something twice-over just in case the first method fails.
- origin
- British idiom, mid-20th century engineering caution
- literal logic
- belt fails, braces catch your pants anyway
- us equivalent
- americans say belt and suspenders
- real use
- backup systems, double-checked contracts, paranoid safety design