the abuse of most

well ok here goes..

way back in primary school i remember we had this debate or something about fashion and men and women. some gender thing. im getting old and i can't remember exactly what, but i think i was arguing against something like fashion is women-dominated or something. yeah sounds strange so it's probably not it but something like that la. anyway my last question to the opposing guy was 'so as long as something is above 50%, you would consider it "most"? ' again for the exact words my memory fails me, but he simply replied 'yes'. and i was dumbfounded. he (maybe it was a she) was right.

which brings me to my point. whenever someone declares that 'most blah blah' it is difficult to prove him wrong. it is too vague a word, yet it sounds so powerful. having 99 of 100 people taking a bus to school everyday would mean most do it, while having 51 of 100 people obese would mean most people are obese. i think you get the point.

and it doesn't help matters that there is so much of everything, so it's easy to get away with making a statement that involves 'most' as compared to 'all'. the numbers are too huge to be tabulated and accounted, so finding the required half to prove me wrong is too tough. all books are non-fiction. most books are non-fiction. there.

and it's this property of 'most' that results in it being abused. too many times i have heard it being used loosely. and of course here the use of 'too many' is also to save me from any argument, because i define 'too many'. in fact, most words are so subjective that it is quite difficult to argue many things. hats off to debaters. and those who see through the previous sentence.

i just read the whole thing over and actually it doesn't really make sense to me -.-

but this post is mostly right.