PEDANTIC QUIBBLE

What point is there in maintaining a blog if you can't post a pedantic quibble from time to time? So here goes.

George W. Bush is rightly mocked by lefties for saying that the American people "misunderestimated me." Fair enough. But every day, it seems, someone in the mainstream media or in the blogosphere misuses the term "underestimate," as in "it is hard to underestimate ..."

Look, if something is incredibly large, expensive, dangerous, beautiful, old, or likely to happen, then it makes sense to say that "it is hard to overestimate" that thing's size, expense, danger, age, or likelihood, meaning "no matter how large, expensive, dangerous, beautiful, old, or likely you estimate it as being, you will probably fall short of how large, etc etc it really is." In other words, it is really hard to overestimate its size, etc. because it is so big, costly, etc. An alternative way to say this is, "You should never underestimate the size, expense, etc etc of that thing, because it is sure to be larger, costlier, etc etc than you think."

Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?

By the way, Bush was wrong. We didn't misunderestimate him. We estimated him as being just about as low as a president could get, and we were right.