Language Log

Frank Rich, "Kiss This War Goodbye", NYT 7/31/2010, writing about the Pentagon Papers:

Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. [emphasis added]

It's clear that this is a mistake, with eke out having been substituted for leak out. The question is, what sort of mistake is it?

To continue the mostathon: when I said that most "licenses a default generalization," I meant to suggest that it has a kind of generic quality — you can't account for its use by assigning it a purely quantitative or numerical meaning (i.e., "more than half"). One way to make the point is to borrow Mark's method and look at examples where most would have been licensed but the writer chose instead to go with many. These are actually quite plentiful:

Among people who did seek out help for their depression, many (68.8 percent) saw or talked to a medical doctor or other health professional.

Many parents surveyed — 62 percent — say they've taken away their child's cell phone as punishment.

Once again, many employers (53 percent) are not yet sure which action they will take.

Why didn't these writers use most instead? It isn't always easy to say, but some of the examples are suggestive.