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Reader question: Please explain this sentence: Car buyers here stick to the tried and true. My comments: This means that car buyers are not keen to try anything new, but instead stick to traditional brands, brands with which they are familiar, brands that they have learned to trust over the years. Here, the tried and true refer to established and well-known brands, instead of new brands that may be good but are not popular as yet. If you stick to something, of course, you keep doing it. Tried and true is a cliché that describes something, a method or advice, that’s not only true but has been repeatedly proven to be true, correct and accurate. And precisely because something’s been proven again and again, people don’t mind doing it one more time. Hence, tried and true products are dependable. Also trusted and true, same thing. Things are trusted because people have used them before and developed an allegiance to them. I’ve also seen another variation of the phrase: time-tested and true. Time-tested? Tested and proven again and again over a long period of time. Tried and true, tested and true, trusted and true, time-tested and true whatever, you see all these words (tried, tested, trusted, time) begin with the letter “T”, the same as the word “true”. This is why these phrases stick – whoever used them first, they soon caught on. | 
