As Darwin said: "False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often long endure; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, as every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness".
So now every game serves as a salutary reminder of how far Forest have fallen since the halcyon days of Clough, with David Platt the latest man charged with the responsibility of leading them out of the first division.
The difficulties faced in union by Henry Paul and Iestyn Harris are a salutary reminder that not every league superstar will make quite the same impact as Jason Robinson.
Every schoolchild studying radiation learns the salutary lesson of Marie Curie, the brilliant French scientist whose unprotected handling of countless radioactive samples led to the bone-marrow disease that killed her.
But the inauguration of democratic competition at every level of Mexican politics can have a salutary effect on a wide range of issues.
But how gripping, and salutary, it would be to discover how much every one of one's friends, acquaintances, enemies made last year.
"And it would be salutary for all of us to realize that every single day that this particular justice sits on that Court will be a silent requiem for Bigger Thomas, the fictional slum boy of 50 years ago who is engraved on Clarence Thomas's heart," she writes.
I laughed out loud at Much Ado About Nothing, placed in a latter-day Italian American diner, with Leonato's brother replaced to salutary effect by a spouse who was in every scene and who voiced a few crucial lines.
The lobby was as clubby as the back room of a saloon, and old residents who had passed each other stonily for 20 years were nodding and exchanging cracks and pleasantries Probably a fire of harmless proportions is a salutary thing once in a while, in a granite civilization where every room is inviolate and every pan is dead.
Like virtually every other week since the shellacking, the State of the Union week was another salutary one for Obama.
