 There is no equivalently clear, crisp definition of legal or proximate cause. At the general level of an overall definition, the most one gets are the bromides: that a proximate cause cannot be remote from its putative effect; it must be a direct cause of the effect; it must not involve such abnormality of causal route that is freakish; it cannot be of harms that were unforeseeable to the actor; its connection to the harm cannot be coincidental; it must make the harm more probable; etc. These bromides are often uttered as if they were synonyms, which in truth the decided cases reveal that they are not.