(This is the 81st article of "A Brief Thoughts". Text: Mr. Shu, December 27, 2020, Singapore)

Recently, "Outlaw Zhang San" The creator of , Mr. Luo Xiang, gave a talk show on the "Talk Show Counter New Year's Eve" program.

This talk show is very exciting. If you haven’t seen it, you can search for it. In my opinion, as far as this talk show is concerned, Mr. Luo is not inferior to professional talk show actors in terms of setting and rhythm control.

Although I quite like watching talk shows—I like all language arts programs—but I’ve been really busy lately, and I wouldn’t have had time to watch a variety show. In fact, I did not watch "Talk Show Against New Year's Eve" in its entirety, but I only searched for the episode of Teacher Luo Xiang to watch.

The reason why I did this is because I found that many people in the circle of friends were retweeting one of the sentences:

When reposting, many people also added "say" It goes deep into my heart" comments like this.

As you all know, I am a person who is very sensitive to language phenomena. I'm very puzzled - this sentence is normal! In Teacher Luo Xiang’s entire talk show, this is not the most outstanding sentence, but why do people like to repeat this sentence?

My doubts were not solved until I saw someone reposting the picture below.

The comment above the picture completely misunderstood Teacher Luo Xiang’s original intention.

Is it because people misunderstood this sentence and forwarded it?

I searched Teacher Luo Xiang’s words on Baidu and found many similar misinterpretations:

Why do I say that this interpretation completely misinterprets Teacher Luo Xiang’s words? What's the original intention? The key lies in the three words "very likely".

Teacher Luo Xiang’s original words were “completely possible”. What does this mean? This means that this possibility cannot be ruled out. Expressed in English words, Teacher Luo Xiang talks about possibility.

However, if we understand "completely possible" as "very likely", we are no longer talking about possibility, but probability. The English word for the former is possibility, and the English word for the latter is probability.

According to my observation, possibility and probability are two concepts that people often get wrong. Possibility is a choice between two, it talks about existence, either it is possible or it is impossible. And probability is a percentage, which can be any number between 0 and 100.

In probability theory, there is the term conditional probability, that is, the probability of an event occurring under certain conditions. Obviously, there is no evidence that a person claiming to abide by the law will increase the probability that he is a scumbag, although the possibility that he is a scumbag cannot be ruled out.

Why people misunderstand this sentence, I think, there may be two reasons.

First, the ambiguity of everyday language. In Chinese, the word "possible" means both possible and probable in English.

In fact, if you look up an English-Chinese dictionary, both possible and probable are translated as "possible". Some rigorous English-Chinese dictionaries will translate probable as "very possible".

However, if you look up the English explanations of these two words, you will find that their meanings are very different. I use the Corinthian Dictionary as an example.

From the English explanation, we can see that possible means "although I don't know whether it is right or wrong, but I accept that it may be right", and probable means "very likely It’s real and it’s likely to happen.”

If you are still a little confused after reading the dictionary explanation, let us examine the combination of possible and probable. Anyone engaged in corpus linguistics knows the famous saying of J. R. Firth:

In English, you can add "completely" in front of "possible", which is equivalent to "completely possible" in Chinese:

However, In the entire 1 billion-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), there is not a single completely probable example. This is not surprising at all. Completely cannot be paired with probable in meaning, just like we cannot say "completely possible" in Chinese.

In fact, due to the connection and difference in meaning between possible and probable, they are often used in contrast, such as:

We can find many such examples in COCA.

The second reason is my speculation. I think that many people get angry after misunderstanding this sentence because people are becoming more and more disgusted with all kinds of pretentious characters. Now it feels good to hear someone say that people who flaunt a certain personality are "more likely" to be scum - although it is a misunderstanding.

There are many ambiguities in daily language. In addition to the "possibility" mentioned today, there are also "fairness" and "equality" mentioned in my previous articles. I just say it casually, it doesn't matter if there is any ambiguity. But if it involves value judgment or speech criticism, it is necessary to clarify the precise meaning of the words in the context, otherwise, it may cause harm to the parties involved.

It was not the first time for Teacher Luo Xiang that someone understood this meaning. Last time I wrote some thoughts on reading, I was scolded from Weibo. I don’t want anything to go wrong this time.

In any case, the bad 2020 is almost over, and we do deserve to feel refreshed at the end of the year, even if this sense of refreshment is caused by misunderstandings. Today, we also learned the difference between possible and probable, which is worth being happy about.

I hope 2021 will be better for all of us. Finally, let me make a sentence using possible and probable as an expectation for the coming year:

It is possible that the coming year will still be a bad one, but I believe it is not probable. Maybe it will still be a bad one in the coming year. It could be bad, but I believe it's very unlikely.