Second-Guessing
On self-doubt, radiology, and game shows
Every time I encounter the verb second-guess, I have to think hard about it. It reminds me of buzzy made-up compounds like upsell and high-touch. Even more annoying, it often doesn’t mean what I think it means. In fact, this word’s behavior in the wild is all over the place.
The first sense of the transitive verb second-guess, according to Merriam-Webster, is “to criticize or question actions or decisions of (someone) often after the results of those actions or decisions are known.”
The term comes from baseball, as I learned from the (British) Phrase Finder website:
The umpire in a baseball game used to be called, rather unkindly, ‘the guesser’. People who were continually telling the guesser, the manager or the players what they were doing wrong were known as ‘secondguessers’ and were so defined in the Sporting News Record Book, 1937:
Secondguesser, one who is continually criticizing moves of players and manager.
(The American football equivalent, I’m told, is “Monday-morning quarterback,” a term that’s been in use since 1930, according to the OED.)1
The verb second-guess, a back-formation from the noun secondguesser (or second-guesser), entered the dictionary in 1941—the same year that gave us bad-mouth, glamour-puss, identity crisis, snow cone, and yikes (among others).
You can still find plenty of second-guessing going on in sports, of course. Another context in which this word shows up a lot is advice or self-help, where it’s yet another behavior we’re told to curb: Don’t second-guess yourself!
Oddly, the criticizing part of the definition doesn’t seem to interest the advice givers much (even though an occasional friendly reminder not to be so hard on ourselves is something many of us could use). Emphasizing instead the questioning part, the advice world uses second-guessing almost always in the sense of doubting.
To second-guess yourself is to lack confidence in your own ideas or decisions, as in this excerpt from the Forbes article “A Psychologist Explains a ‘Psychologically Safe’ Workplace”:
A recent survey of the American workforce found that 41% of all VPs have a nagging belief that they are underqualified to be handling the responsibilities of their jobs. So, if you ever second-guess yourself at work, you shouldn’t worry about it too much.
But self-doubt isn’t always something to be avoided. Far from it. In her recent post about rebranding, Lyn Chamberlin of The Brand Dame writes:
Embrace the discomfort. Rebranding is messy and uncomfortable. You’ll second-guess yourself more times than you can count, but that’s part of the process. Lean into it—it’s a sign that you’re on the right track.
If you’re a copyeditor, a healthy reservoir of self-doubt is indispensable. Self-doubt is what sends a good copyeditor to the dictionary or style guide to make sure she’s choosing the best solution for the issue at hand.
Show me a copyeditor with no self-doubt and I’ll show you a published book with errors in it.
Even Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer admits he has to look up the difference between “continuously” and “continually” every time he encounters either word (“one means ‘without interruption’ and the other means ‘at regular intervals’ … but which is which?”).
Out in the world, another problem with second-guessing is its confusing proximity to second thoughts, as in this headline from the San Antonio Express-News: “Elon Musk’s stalling leads Mexico to second-guess massive Tesla factory in Nuevo Leon.” Mexico isn’t criticizing or questioning the plan. The factory hasn’t materialized, and Mexico is having second thoughts about agreeing to the project.
M-W’s definition of a second thought is a “reconsideration or a revised opinion of a previous often hurried decision,” as in, “After she agreed to lend him the money (to build a big factory in Mexico?), she had second thoughts.”
In other cases, second-guessing seems to mean merely changing your mind. For example, when Gmail introduced “email emoji reactions,” Ars Technica pointed out that once sent, these “reactions” couldn’t be reversed if you changed your mind: “There’s only Gmail’s ‘Undo send’ feature for taking back reactions, which delays sending emails for about 30 seconds, so you can second-guess yourself.”
Second-guessing can also get tangled up with the idea of a second opinion, which is what you might seek out if you disagree with someone’s judgment—for example, if you think radiologists, like umpires, are really just guessers.
A headline in the journal Radiology Business announces, “Platform allowing patients to second-guess their radiologists’ findings expands to 12 states.” The article goes on to describe a “‘second opinion platform,’ which allows patients to question their radiologists’ findings.” Don’t like the results of that scan? You can pay to spin again: upload your medical image files, choose from a list of “independent, subspecialized” radiologists, and get a second guess—I mean a “second opinion report.”
To add to the confusion, the second dictionary sense of second-guess is “to seek to anticipate or predict.” Presumably that’s the meaning intended in this “Top Tip” from Boating Life Magazine (June 2003): “Wear your life vest and don’t second-guess the currents.”2
At least three game shows called Second Guess have been attempted, each one demonstrating a different understanding of the term.
In 1982, Dick Clark hosted an unsold pilot for the first Second Guess, a game in which one pair of players made several statements on a given subject and the other pair of players had “to ‘second guess’ or read their partners [sic] minds by guessing what statements their partners gave.” (Second-guessing as mindreading? That’s a new one on me—maybe they were thinking of second sight?)
In 1986, Alex Trebek hosted an unsold pilot for a different Second Guess, in which two couples competed. Trebek gave a question and three possible answers, and “the first player on either team to buzz in could choose one of those answers.” But “if his/her partner thought the buzz-in player was wrong, (s)he could make a ‘second guess’ and choose a different answer.” (I’d give this show points for sticking with the straightforward noun phrase “second guess” and avoiding the verb second-guess altogether.)
The Brits successfully produced a family game show called Second Guess that actually aired, from 1993 to 1994. The show’s “main quirk” was that “when you buzz in, your partner/team mate answers the question for you.”3 (I’m not sure what this game’s creators meant the name to convey. If the host asks a question of one player and is answered by another player, isn’t the answer more of a third-party guess?)
A concept related to both second-guessing and Monday-morning quarterbacking is “hindsight bias,” for which Wikipedia offers this wonderful definition: “Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon or creeping determinism, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were.”
Interestingly, in British English, this is the first sense of the word, “to guess what someone will do in the future” (and the criticizing-with-hindsight sense is second).
In the final round, the family member-players had to relay a 50-word story in a game of Chinese Whispers—what we in the U.S. would call Telephone.
Thanks for this shoutout, @honoluluquirk and for including me in this fascinating post about what it means to second-guess. I consider myself in very good company here!