I was browsing another thread a while ago, and someone made the claim, “The vast majority of Americans support X”, and they cited a survey that showed somewhat less than two-thirds of the responders supported X. Never mind what the poll was about, I’m just interested in the term “vast majority”.
I’ve often felt that this term is used rather too loosely. To me, 64% or so is not a vast majority, it’s just a regular majority. I might even say it’s a fairly large majority, but not vast.
To me a vast majority indicates a vanishingly small percentage of (whatever) lies outside of it. To me, something like 99.9+% qualifies as a vast majority. Even a flat 99% is only an overwhelming majority.
IMHO, of course.
I don’t suppose there’s a definitive answer, which is why I’m posing this here, instead of GQ. So what say you, Dopers? What’s your taxonomy of majorities?
I suspect that’s true in a lot of cases, jjiimm, but not always. In the particular case that sparked this thread, it was more along the lines of, “I don’t support this, but the vast majority do.” The vast majority in this case being 64%.
It seems to be a simple rhetorical device. People use it because it sounds better than saying “most people” or “a lot of people”. It just strikes me as terribly imprecise. But then, I can be just a wee bit pedantic at times.
Also, if 34% of people think one way, and 7% of them think another way, that’s not a vast majority, because there is still 59% of the population unaccounted for.
I therefore hereby impose my own arbitrary guideline, which everyone has to follow from now on:
You can only call something a “vast majority” when what is being described is at least 75% of the total.
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In this case it was 64% - 32% (apparently 4% undecided) which is exactly 2 to 1.
In a vote, being outnumbered 2 to 1 is pretty vast, IMO. It basically means you have no chance of winning.
Speakers often use those terms to describe groups which they are not a part of, for example: “The vast majority of the people in this Walmart are rednecks.”
I’ll also note that in politics a “landslide” is often considered anything more than a 10 point spread (which is only 55% to 45% with two candidates.) Evidentally people in politics are fond of hyperbole.
But in that example, if only 16% changed their minds, you’d be back to a 50/50 split (or 48/48/4, whatever). How can that be considered a vast majority?
I would only use the phrase in cases like this: “The vast majority of people will never be struck by lightning in their lives.” Or, “Millions of people play the lottery, but the vast majority will never win a significant amount of money.” Only a few people out of millions.
To me, the word vast means a really staggeringly large number. Mind-bogglingly big. The universe is vast. Or forget the universe, let’s use a more local example: The Earth is big. The Sun is overwhelmingly big, compared to the Earth. But the Sun is just a speck in the whole Solar System. The vast majority of the Solar System is just empty space (give or take a few stray atoms).
It seems to me that the phrase loses its utility for describing things lke that if we also use it to describe a simple 2 to 1 margin.
Well, I truly didn’t mean to pick on you specifically. That’s why I didn’t include your name or the thread title. Though you obviously saw through my clever obfuscation. (That’s right, folks, Eleusis is the unnamed poster in the OP.)
But yours wasn’t the first time I’d seen what I considered to be a misuse of the phrase, it was just the one that prompted me to start this thread. I wondered if anyone else felt the same way about it. It seems not though. Even the highest threshold so far proposed, 85%, is not what I would have called vast, so it may be that this word does not mean what I think it means.
