[SGVLUG] OT our wonderful English language...

[Terry Hancock]

The root word of "comprehensive" means "to contain".

Noun A may said to cover Noun B "comprehensively" if
the referrent of Noun B is a complete subset of the
referent of Noun A.

Thus, if you have dug up every piece of ice in Greenland,
(or less literally, core sampled every single square
kilometer of Greenland's glacier) *then* you may be
said to have a "comprehensive" survey.

I hope you realize that that is in fact impracticable,
thus the best you are likely to get is a "virtually
comprehensive" survey.

Because they are interested in uncovering objective
facts without being swayed by politics (whether someone
else's or *even their own*), scientists have a strong
desire to stick as close to the objective, absolute meanings
of words as possible.

Nevertheless, you have to compress information in order to
create an abstract so that non-scientists will even bother
to read the results. Otherwise you get things like the
Challenger disaster where the numbers clearly said "don't
fly", but the text made this point inadequately, and the
decision makers (of course) only read the text in making
their decision.  Saying whether this is the fault of
the "decision-makers" or the "abstract-writers" is a
political question.

If you were to actually READ the paper in _Science_, I am
sure that "virtually comprehensive" is *explicitly* defined
in terms of a quantitative description of the data set.

Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com