> as lemmas

1949 Sewanee Rev. 57 561 The writer may include or leave out too much and so distort his vision. If successful the writer will find that he has made Goldilocks' choice of a gruel neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.

1965 Jrnl. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 60 618 Following these three ‘Goldilocks’ possibilities of discrepancy, we shall attempt to evaluate each of the 1950 SMA's as being either underbounded, truebounded or overbounded with respect to the metropolitan area it is meant to represent.

1978 B. B. Hess & J. M. Waring in R. M. Lerner et al. Child Infl. on Marital & Family Interaction ix. 259 There is also evidence of what can be called a Goldilocks effect, whereby both too many and too few family contacts are perceived as stressful, so that there is a level of ‘just right’.

1988 N.Y. Times (Nexis) 13 Nov. iii a 9/1 The ‘Goldilocks’ scenario..would have the G.N.P. slowing in 1989 to an annual growth rate of 2 to 2.5 percent.

1996 A. Ikwue & J. Skea in R. Welford & R. Starkey Business & Environm. 227 The best justification which has been obtained [for the choice of a tax level of $10 per barrel of oil equivalent] is that ‘$5 was too soft, $20 was too hard’ (the ‘Goldilocks’ principle).

2010 D. F. Bruce et al. Making Baby (rev. ed.) 235 The major problem with fertility drugs is the Goldilocks phenomenon. It is sometimes hard to get it just right!

2015 R. L. Allington et al. in P. D. Pearson & E. H. Hiebert Res.-based Pract. for Teaching Common Core Literacy 164 Students benefit most..when the selected texts offer a modest level of challenge (akin to a Goldilocks effect—not too hard, not too easy).