Meaning
An area you cannot see or will not see: literally the part of the road hidden from a driver's mirrors, and figuratively a subject about which someone is uninformed, prejudiced, or simply unable to think clearly - the flaw most obvious to everyone except its owner. Works at every register, literal in driving, psychological in criticism; the plural often means simply someone's unexamined assumptions rather than a single flaw. Regional use: General English; French scientific origin.
Origin
The phrase began in the anatomy of the eye. The French physicist Edme Mariotte discovered in the 1660s that the point where the optic nerve attaches to the retina carries no light-detecting cells, so a patch of every visual field is literally unseen - a finding he demonstrated at the court of Louis XIV and before the Royal Society, overturning the assumption that the nerve's entry point was the retina's most sensitive area. The brain interpolates the gap, which is why we never notice. From optics the term spread to driving - the zones no mirror reaches, now monitored by blind-spot sensors - and then to character. Harper Lee gave the figurative sense its classic line in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960): Mr Cunningham is basically a good man, he just has his blind spots along with the rest of us. Wiktionary now lists both the prejudice sense and the simple ignorance sense, and psychologists have since added the bias blind spot, the documented tendency to see bias in others but not in oneself.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- blind spots
- have a blind spot
Usage Examples
- The insurer's lawyers had a blind spot the size of the exclusion clause they had drafted themselves.
- Check your blind spot twice before merging; the dashboard sensor is a help, not a licence.
- Every great editor has a blind spot, and hers was any manuscript mentioning sailing.