Some uses of hyperbole bother me for no particularly good reason. For example, the description of the Opera web browser here states that Opera “runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and countless other platforms.” It then links “countless other platforms” to this page, which lists the 11 platforms that Opera supports.

See, counting them wasn’t that hard. I wonder at what point in that list they gave up and said “there are just too many here to count.” Although, they went a step beyond that, because rather than saying “several” or “more”, they went ahead and said “countless.” As if “it is simply impossible to enumerate the mind-boggling number of platforms that this product supports. You couldn’t even count them if you wanted to.”

It reminds me of the time when Schulte and I were in Vegas and he joked that he’d misplaced a bunch of chips in the room, and there’s “no telling” how much they’re worth. We then determined that there probably is a way – if we looked at each chip, noted the value written on it’s surface, and summed them.