Bad language, like bad news, travels fast. Bad language travels fastest when it has pretensions to sound highly educated. When, for example, and to what point, did the word “multiple” replace “many” or “several” or even specific numbers? Today we have multiple flights, multiple bills before Congress, multiple murders. So tired have I grown of hearing the word “multiple” that I have taken to referring to the well-known nerve-damage disease as “many sclerosis.”
And when did the clear and simple word “statistics” depart the language in favor of “metrics” or “analytics”? The latter two, perhaps most frequently used by sports broadcasters, give the false impression of depth. “Statistics,” plain old numbers, sounds boring, while “metrics” sounds available only to the expert, and “analytics,” of course, suggests subtle analysis. Not so. It’s all stats, Slats.
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