When I confessed some of the intricacies of my caffeine usage earlier in the book, it would have done you, the gentle reader, very little good for me to say that I “like pop.” You would have no idea what that means in the wider arena of likes and dislikes. Even if I were to say that I like pop “a lot,” you have no frame of reference. Does that mean “more than average”? More than I like rutabagas? More than I like watching football? How close is “a lot” to “more than I could possibly like anything in the world”? Or is it more along the lines of “yeah... I suppose I wouldn’t mind having a pop”? Without a frame of reference, many of our statements are lost in the inherent vagaries of language.
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