“But I can swear to you that if you take the worst thing you can imagine about those people and multiply it by ten, then square it, and multiply it by another thousand, you still won’t even come close to getting an idea of what a bunch of pieces of shit they are.”
Let us remember that the purpose of this blog is not to hunt for errors or engage in criticism, but rather to appreciate the use of science and scientific terminology as literary devices. And I think this is a good example of that, or at least an appropriate one: the use of mathematical operations to reinforce a hyperbole. Such operations can be used both to magnify something and to reduce it to the bare minimum, as in Bart Simpson’s famous “Multiply yourself by zero.”
Let this post also serve as an opportunity to talk about this very British novel — British to the nth degree, to borrow the device we have just been discussing — a sort of literary The Crow
