The news is so bad right now everywhere that it is natural to take refuge in discussing matters of (bad) style. I have things to say about the real issues too but not this time.
I am following in the tradition of Niklaus Wirth who told me that he regularly sent letters of complaint to the editor when reading a newspaper article claiming that some solution (after a negotiation in politics, for example) was the “lowest common denominator”, where the author wanted to say, pejoratively, the least bad agreeable outcome, but was not actually saying that since (Wirth’s words) the lowest common denominator is always 1. What they meant was the greatest common denominator. I am not sure how many papers published his corrections or even had some idea of what he was talking about.
Here is another silly cliché in the same vein: “exponentially larger”. Presumably intended to mean larger, but more than larger, very much larger. Very, very much larger. Very, very, very much.
Latest example: Washington Post, 7 September 2025, in an article about the Hyundai factory raid, “the engineers [are experts on] equipment that can handle voltage loads exponentially higher than those at legacy factories”.
Except that it does not mean “very much higher” because it really does not mean anything at all. Any value is in some sense exponentially higher than any other value. For example, 10.01 is exponentially higher than 10. You don’t believe me? Take the function f such that f (x), for any x, is ax (definitely an exponential function!), here for a = 1.001. Then for the two consecutive integer values x = 2304 and x + 1 = 2305 we have f (x) = 10 and f (x+1) = 10.01 (within very close approximations).
So, by and large, anything is “exponentially higher” than anything. The phrase is meaningless. (By the way, I found out that over the years Washington Post readers have regularly complained, in the splendid Wirth tradition, about the overuse and misuse of that expression, sometimes rightly and sometimes less rightly. See It may be a lot, but it is not always exponential, 2013; Exponential growth in the usage of exponential growth, also 2013; Overuse of ‘existential threat’ is a crisis of existential proportions, 2023. Misuse continues unabated, as in Miss Manners: Embarrassing moment got exponentially worse, 2021, although the matter of what exactly became “exponentially” worse in that case is better left out of the present distinguished blog.)
A phrase that does mean something is exponential growth. Also a journalistic cliché, not always applied rightly, but at least a meaningful one. Exponential growth means a function of the form ax or some generalization such as c . ax+ d.
“Meaningful”, by the way, means something precise: falsifiable. A property is relevant if we can determine whether it holds or not in any particular case. The reason “exponentially larger” is a pointless phrase is that it can be made true for any pair of values, even 10 and 10.01. On the other hand, some functions are exponential and others (the vast majority of possible functions) are not — with, in both cases, a clear decision (yes or no). That falsifiability is what makes “exponential growth” a meaningful concept.
One may hope that journalists and others will take note. Not that I really expect an exponential decrease in the use of “exponential”-related malapropisms.
