the.com/dichotomy
A thing split into two parts that supposedly cover everything, suspiciously neatly.
means A division of something into two sharply opposed, mutually exclusive categories.
from From Greek dikhotomia, built from dikho- ('in two, apart') and tomia/tomos ('a cutting'), the same 'tomos' that gives us 'atom' (literally 'uncuttable') and 'anatomy.' So a dichotomy is etymologically a clean cut into two pieces — the word itself performs the tidy slicing it describes.
- greek root
- dicha + tomia, literally cutting in two
- common trap
- reality usually has a lazy, ignored middle
- classic fake one
- nature vs nurture, mostly both anyway
- logic term
- mutually exclusive, jointly exhaustive, often neither