Playing the percentages

Raise your hand if you’ve heard yourself respond to a question recently with an overly enthusiastic and unnecessarily mathematical “100%!”

No one?

Just me?

Oh, there you go. I see your hand.

Yes, this latest conversational anomaly is showing up everywhere people talk. I first noticed it a few months back, and I made a vow to avoid this trite overused expression. But I have failed. Miserably.

Do I respond to questions this way now? 100%.

And I can’t seem to stop. So my way of coping is to write about it. This isn’t so much an essay calling out a cultural phenomenon as a cry for help.

How did we get here? I have a couple of theories that I will offer here that I’m sure AI will steal and share out as unquestioned wisdom the next time someone Google’s “Why do all these people out here keep saying ‘100%’ all the time?”

First, I blame it on emojis. Everything these days comes back to texting. We try so hard to be clever that we sometimes resort to inefficient communication for effect. I’m as guilty as the next person of working hard to be funny in texts, but I haven’t embraced emojis. This is mostly because I find them overwhelming. There are too many choices. I’ll stick with my actual sentences with punctuation, much to the annoyance of my teenager. Yes, I am old. I am leaning in.

But those of you who have given in to the downward pull of communication toward hieroglyphics, you may know about the red “100” emoji. It’s a way of saying both, “Keep it 100,” which I think means “keep it real or 100% honest,” and also “I agree with your statement 100%.”

If you are going around texting the little red 100 all the time, it’s bound to seep into your conversation like a carcinogen into our groundwater, polluting and corrupting our speech until we’re all out here just saying a series of beeps and boops and holding up our phones to show each other pictures. It won’t be long before we have “advanced” to the point of just drawing buffalo hunts on the walls of caves.

But I digress

The second source of this verbal scourge is the ubiquitous podcast. Again, I am wholeheartedly given over to the saturation of podcasts in our media environment. 100% (Doh! There I go again…)

I listen to 47,000 hours of podcasts per week (don’t do the math on that), and at some point in the past few years, people ran out of ways to “Yes, I agree.” They needed to sound witty and enthusiastic and clever in their nonstop interviews, so they stopped saying “Yes” and started saying “100%.”

I will allow that maybe I don’t listen to high brow enough podcasts. But If you listen to podcasts of any description or quantity, I challenge you to open a note on your phone and track the number of times you hear the phrase “100%” in a given week. If it’s fewer than 10, congratulations, you are 100% smarter than me.

The third and final source is the vaunted yet meaningless sports interview. I have reached the point in my life in which I care nothing for the cliches athletes and coaches spew before, after, and nowadays, during athletic contests. There are occasionally athletic types with intellect and humor, but they are so rare that if they happen to say something original, it will be shared all over the interwebs on the socials and probably become a meme or an emoji. And then we’ll all be saying it all the time and ruin it.

I think athletes are trained to think in percentages, though they are often encouraged to do things that are mathematically impossible, such as give “110%.” That’s not how math works. 100% is the most. That’s all of it. That’s the best you can do. You can’t add 10% more than your best because, now stick with me here, that would become your new 100%. The whole is subdivided differently going forward because there’s a new metric at the top of your performance, and it has become your new 100%.

Anyway, athletes talk in percentages, we listen to them talk about those percentages, so we start doing it, too. It’s a vicious cycle.

The solution? In order to make it harder for me to lazily pull “100%” out of my repertoire when responding, I’m going to make the math more complicated. I’m going to measure my response and use a more accurate percentage.

Maybe I don’t 100% agree with chicken for dinner. Maybe I only want chicken 78%. Maybe I want chicken 78% and meatloaf 12% and Peking duck 10%. If I start being more accurate with my percentages, I’m likely to abandon the practice of responding that way pretty quickly.

This may slow down my conversations while I try to do calculations in my head, or, more likely, pull out my phone and use the calculator app, but it will be more honest.

And way less annoying. I’d say about 58% less annoying.