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A comment on In Urban China, Cash Is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete. Parent comment

Re:In Urban China, Cash Is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete by MichaelBurge on Monday July 17, 2017 @05:52AM (#14786981)
To me, "most" implies "at least 95%". That's because it's used to exclude a possibility: If most programming languages have if statements, then if I hear about your new language I can assume it has if statements without checking further.

To use a simple majority means that you'd have to accept a simple statement like "Most programmers use Javascript"[1], and that's too weak to use for any reasoning.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160317205014/http://stackoverf...

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Re:In Urban China, Cash Is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete by lallysingh on Monday July 17, 2017 @08:02AM (#14787681)
> To me, "most" implies "at least 95%".

https://www.xkcd.com/1860/

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Re:In Urban China, Cash Is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete by matz1 on Monday July 17, 2017 @09:02AM (#14788066)
No, it can also mean more than half.
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Re:In Urban China, Cash Is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete by MichaelBurge on Monday July 17, 2017 @10:22AM (#14788708)
I asked a few friends how they use the word, and apparently there are people that use it to mean "nearly all" and people that use it to mean "more than half", and the first group doesn't realize the second group exists.

This paper[1] gives a couple interpretations, none of which are as strict as the one I use. I wonder if I mixed up "conversational implicatures" with a heuristic for logical implication.

In any case, I've apparently been wrong about the meaning of a basic English word my whole life, and I can't find a good cover story to hide the mistake.

[1] http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/fileadmin/mitarbeiter/solt/Most...

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Re:In Urban China, Cash Is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete by BeetleB on Monday July 17, 2017 @11:13AM (#14789272)
>This paper[1] gives a couple interpretations

If we're talking grammar, then it is "a couple of interpretations".

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Re:In Urban China, Cash Is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete by flexie on Monday July 17, 2017 @01:19PM (#14790542)
Most is more than 50 percent. 'Most all' means almost all which sounds like what you meant :-)
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