Hopeful Thinking: Fighting fire with water

Hopeful Thinking: Fighting fire with water

Where the heck did we get the idea of fighting fire with fire? For how often it gets used, it sure doesn’t seem like good advice. It actually comes from two places. The first is an indigenous firefighting practice where a larger fire is starved of fuel by setting a smaller, controlled fire ahead of it and burning up the fuel in its path. Firefighters still use it today. The second, however, comes from William Shakespeare. He wrote in his 1595 pl…