Re: LSSU issues annual list of words to be banished

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

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.

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