Re: LSSU issues annual list of words to be banished

["Dude VanWinkle" <dudevanwinkle () gmail com>]

On Jan 4, 2008 4:24 PM,  <Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu> wrote:
> On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 08:46:50 EST, Dude VanWinkle said:
>
> > Dang, I was hoping to see "virtually" in that list... I hate hearing
> > that "virtually all of $x blah". Either you got 100% or you didn't.
> > Don't try and make your failure to deploy something to everyone sound
> > like a success by invoking that over-and-mis-used word..
>
> I dunno.  If we try to push something to 30,000 users, and we manage to
> get 29,999 of them, most people would call that a success even though
> we didn't get 100% of them.
>
> And sometimes, "virtually all" is good enough to declare victory - at some
> point, you have to admit that the costs of getting *every single one* are
> above the costs of dealing with the few you missed.
>
> For example, note that we've "virtually eradicated" polio in North
> America by making sure that "virtually all" the people are immunized - but
> in fact, the immunization rate is only about 97% or so.  It simply isn't
> worth it to track down the other 3%, because that's not enough of a
> population to sustain an outbreak.

Thats what the word almost, or your even more descriptive numeric
representation of 97% is for.

Much better than virtually IMO, lots more pertinent data

:-)

-JP
>
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