Making the "Most" of It

Arthur Jones—one of my mentors, my former boss, a former mercenary, a former wild animal importer and conservationist, an airplane and helicopter pilot, and the inventor of the Nautilus exercise machine—asserted that the best information that any one of us has about our world is no more than a cobbled-together collection of vague impressions. This is a stunning admission from a man who had an IQ around 200.

[Once hearing this from Arthur, I sometimes wonder how it is possible for someone like me to do more than roll and crawl around in the street and mumble gibberish.]

Language is the business of conveying these impressions (concepts).

And writing—a la Richard Mitchell—is the business of connecting impressions in a framework for reasoning. Mitchell pounded into his audience that reasoning really does not occur—or does not occur very well—without writing… stringing symbols together so that they can be examined and then shared for re-examining.

I often reflect that my ability to verbalize a concept—although it originated in the ether of my mind—is greatly hobbled without me first sorting it by writing it in prose. And from there, more synaptic action begins to occur. Through this process, I get it from my head to my hands, so to speak, or in this case, from my head to my tongue.

In some of my books I have made the point that I often begin a subject with really little to say on a matter, and through the course of writing what little I initially can, I discover a wholly new world of related ideas that I deem worthy to share.

In writing my book, The Renaissance of Exercise—Volume II, I reluctantly opted to include a chapter about friction that I had laid aside ten years earlier. I strongly believed the topic to be important, but I saw no possibility of doing more than repeating the same, dry information. But once delving into it, I realized many other revelations. The book now has four chapters relating this one subject. I can’t speak for my readership, but I greatly entertained myself.

Of course, this process can be disappointing. I now have six almost-complete articles awaiting my attention in the queue. I expect that they are all dead-ends as some of them have been gathering dust for months. And by the same process of the writing that bore me the articles that I have actually published, these latent ideas have crashed. But this, as Mitchell emphasized, is one of the important purposes of writing. I should be grateful and not disappointed.

In my personal quest to use language to accurately convey ideas, I’m constantly comparing the imagery of my words to my intended meaning. After all, the imagery is the foundation of words. For efficient communication, the imagery of the words must match the concepts held in the minds of both the speaker and the listener. Otherwise, conveyance fails.

[As much as I recently focus on imagery, I admit that I failed to grasp the fundamental meaning of imagery. This failure is one of several that slowed my intellectual development in various ways. When I mention imagery—like when I assert that the imagery of inflation does not match prices increasing—I always suspect that some of my readers are as clueless to its meaning and importance as I was for many years.]

For example, my neighbors are Cuban and, except for three of the ten members of their household, speak only Spanish. As I speak only English, I cannot understand the Spanish. I joke about being an English bigot as the phonetic utterances to my ear in English induce an imagery for which the same phonics in Spanish do not. My mind and my way of thinking are completely devoted to English.

[When someone asks me the number of languages that I speak, my honest reply (I’m not joking) is that I’m still struggling to competently write and speak just the English.]

As my general purpose herein is to foster better communication, the specific objective of this article is to draw out another often-overlooked distinction that might be extremely important in some contexts.

I copied the following from the preface of one of my books. I now include these paragraphs in every preface:

I distinguish between most and almost all. Most can loosely indicate a wide range of occurrence to different people; however, I use it, specifically, to indicate more than 50%.

When I want to convey an occurrence that is close to 100%, I employ almost all.

This problem jumped out at me yesterday. I heard a podcaster quote an official at a military meeting in Poland as saying that the Ukrainians had lost “…about 50%” of their tanks in their war with Russia. The podcaster then, apparently disagreeing, stated his belief that the Ukrainians had really lost “most” of their tanks.

So how much different are about 50% and most…especially if 50.0000001% qualifies as most?

How do people interpret most? Obviously, this varies. And thus, the danger. And this danger is real and physical when most is thoughtlessly thrown around in some technical application such as medicine or engineering.

And almost all is not much better as it is still subjective. In my excerpted paragraphs above, I appear to delineate my usage of the two terms admirably, but then again, when I state “close to 100%,” I did not define close… lots of traps here!

I have heard seasoned statisticians struggle with these words.