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Overheard while waiting to board a flight: "We'll board group 3 first, right after we board groups 1 and 2."
The most disconcerting thing about this moment wasn't its egregious abuse of the number line. It was, rather, that people waiting to board the plane didn't bat an eye. We could speculate on the reasons for this: perhaps people know the order and so don't listen to the announcement. Perhaps we've reached the point where we don't expect announcements to make sense anymore. Or maybe the announcement just sounded right, especially since it was coming from someone with a microphone and a modicum of authority.
This third possibility-that things can sound right when they are not-is troubling. This is because it is easier to make things sound right than to actually make them right, especially in academia where we have such advanced quality "microphones" and more than a modicum of authority. It is easier to say things like "We employed an inductive approach to our qualitative analysis, identifying common categories and subjecting...