Inflation: a rant.

Look, if you're involved in a sport, or a business, or an essay, or a piece of art, giving it a hundred per cent is an admirable thing.


A hundred per cent means a hundred out of a hundred: or, for the numerically confused, everything.


So, does it matter if people (especially footballers, I'm afraid) keep talking about giving a hundred and twenty per cent?


Yep.

Look, once they've burst through the hundred per cent barrier then they're flying through infinite space, and we end up in the silly situation where don't know how many everything is.

It's like an exam where no one knows what the top possible mark is. Is ten marks brilliant? Or appalling?


This per cent lunacy came to mind when I discovered recently that, not content with inhabiting the utterly blissful cloud nine, there are some people out there claiming to be on cloud ten.


I watched an excellent film called THIS IS SPINAL TAP, too. In it Nigel Tufnel's Marshall guitar amp dial famously goes up to eleven.

Mind you, nowadays some Marshall amps go up to twenty.


Ah well. To exaggerate is human...


Phrase To Use Correctly Today: a hundred per cent. Hundred comes from the Greek word hekaton, and per cent is Medieval Latin for out of a hundred.