I'm sure you've all seen the image above or some variant of it at some point. It's pretty old but I feel it has made a recent surge over the last months on the usual social media sites, particularly LinkedIn.
There are few words that catch my attention more than "coincidence", so after stumbling across this image I just had to dig a little deeper.
The morale behind the simple arithmetic is cute, but the argumentation is as weak as they come, using a single outlier example. What the image fails to mention (or, more accurately: voluntarily omits) is all the positive words that also miss the 100(%) mark, and even most importantly all the negative words that also had a perfect score of 100(%).
It doesn't take long to pull all words from the english language and score them based on alphabetical position. The resulting histogram is actually very pretty (and yet another display of how the Gaussian distribution is everywhere!):
Any clue on what the highest scoring word is? Well COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES scores 299, no word scores in the 300s.
But back to our original question, it turns that while Knowledge and Hardwork both miss the mark, ATTITUDE and 656 other words score a perfect 100! It turns out that 100 is just slightly greater than the mean (98) and median (95) of word scores, so a PLETHORA (scores 95) of words obtain the perfect score of 100, among which these SINGULAR (scores 101) words:
ACKNOWLEDGE (so better to ACKNOWLEDGE than to possess KNOWLEDGE apparently)
ADULTHOOD
AMPUTEES
ANALYSIS
ARRESTS
ASBESTOS
ATTITUDE
BEWITCHING
BOOZERS
BOYCOTT
CACOPHONY
CHEESEMAKING
CHIMPANZEE
DIVORCEES
EJECTIONS
FATALISTIC
GRUMPY
HOOLIGANS
HOOTERS
HOSPITAL
IMMATURE
IMPOTENCE
INEFFICIENT
IRRITATE
LUBRICANT
MASOCHISM
MOUSSAKA
NUTTY
OBSCENELY
OUTLIER
OXTAILS
SEASHELLS
SHREWDER
SNIPERS
SNOBBERY
STOOLS
TETANUS
TOILETS
UNDRESS
UNMANLY
WHISKEY
WIZARDS
Hopefully this post will bring some alternatives to all those with attitude problems who still want to reach 100% (oh and by the way, 100% of what??). And don't forget that BULLSHIT (103) will always get your further ahead!
