Wordle of confused words
I’ve been debating the use of the words Few, Many, Much, Several, Couple, and Most with my friend Rushad. These are obviously words that get used often, but there’s no defining bar on when you can and cannot use these terms.
In common parlance this is all very well – most casual conversation is pretty ambiguous anyway. But I’ve seen a disconcerting trend in news programs utilizing these terms as though they meant something specific, and more often than not using them in statistically incorrect ways. I can’t immediately recall examples, but Wolf Blitzer said something about most Americans which, when I looked up the statistics, turned out to be a marginal excess. Something like the “most” portion was 47% vs. the non-most was 43%. If most is now being equated with more, and that’s from the perspective of news, then there’s a serious question about the veracity of reporting. Anyway that’s just one more reason to consider CNN worthless, but that’s a separate op-ed piece.
What would be interesting is to be able to map the frequency of specific words and analyze what news outlets are telling us. And maybe overlay this with a credibility index, or something like that. I’m sure someone’s done it, but googling for a bit revealed nothing 
Anyway, just something to think about.
(Credits: Wordle based on content from Words that Confuse)
This is a great post and observation! I would love to see the analysis you discuss (if it exists). I also so often get infuriated with CNN these days. I phoned my mom on Sunday and CNN had her scared into so many untruths that essentially resulted from their use of imprecise language or dangling statements/stories (without the context of the larger picture). Are they trying to compete with talk radio by being salacious?
Where's the News in CNN (forget about a J for Journalism)? Many are lately speaking of restoring journalism as a point of focus (over the type of media that presents it), which I find a noble effort.
We just renewed our subscription to The New York Times (delivered via mail to Fairfield) and appreciate that we can take our time to read the news and have more exposure to depth and context. Personally, I love a newspaper. We spent the Winter trying each to read the news off of our computers. That didn't work for me at all and my husband didn't pefer it . I need to have the physical paper in my midst (what a fossil…).
This reminds me of a great logic professor I had in college. He taught the entire class by using real newspaper stores to illustrate examples of common fallacies. The students had the task of analyzing the news story, determining which fallacy (if any) existed, and then rewrite portions of the article to remove the fallacy (using correct logic and reasoning).
It was a real eye opener to the level of fallacious reasoning put forth on any given day in any given newspaper.
Heya Saffi, I LOVE the texture and smell of newspapers (may be a genetic thing from my printing-family background). In fact it's the one thing I've missed since I turned off all paper in lieu of blogs. But given the atrocious state of news reporting I just could not justify subscribing to a paper any more
I think there's going to be a time when physical media comes back. But that won't happen until journalism returns. And the only Journalism I've seen so far (barring NYT and WP) are online. So much better investigative reporting happens by bloggers. I think that's where we (FairfieldVoice) even have an opportunity – get back to reporting and journalism and maybe we can start inspiring people again. Yeah, grand visions, but that's how these things start, right?
I think it's interesting to note that none of us really believe anything we hear in the mainstream news anymore, but it somehow continues to garner a huge audience.
Sounds like an excellent class. What was the professor's name?