Learn English – Meaning of “have never been the worse for that”

meaning-in-contextphrases

Can someone explain what is meant by "have never been worse for that" in the following paragraph.

Golan's book is good but its title is misleading. A whole chapter is
devoted to the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse and I'm willing to bet that
most professional mathematicians including, say, Grothendieck have no
idea what it is about, and have never been the worse for that!

Thank you.

Best Answer

This is a stock phrase, perhaps more often encountered as to be none the worse for it.

To be the worse for something means "to be in a worse situation as a consequence" of it, and this phrase adds the emphatic negative none = "not at all". Your example could be paraphrased as

Professional mathematicians have never suffered any ill consequence from knowing nothing about the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse.

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