There's this one thing that follows me in my daily life, that is extra super annoying and makes communication really hard and makes both me and the people I'm communicating with just not understand each other at all. What I'm talking about is the mistake that someone makes, when they don't know the extent of a scale of stuff they are measuring, and they tend to think that anything that is slightly more/higher/worse than what they are most used with is super super biggest thing in the world. Funnily this applies to two of my favorite pastimes: linguistics and food. In linguistics, I have studied this stuff called morphology or word-formation, this means roughly that we can model with computers now how shoes is formed from shoe + s making more than one shoe and unfortunately is formed from fortune and ate and un and ly making negated fortune that tags on to a verb like an adverb. In food, we have a concept of spiciness or hotness, generally related to spices made from chilies or so, but can also be used for peppers, horse radish or whatever. But as you might guess most people are not aware that languages more complex than English can range from slightly to million billion times, and spices more potent than black pepper and salt can also range from slightly spicy to pepper spray.
Now the thing is is, in English there are not many things that you can add to words at all, so there's no morphology, you can add s to make plurals, you can add 's to make genitives* and then that's about it, so around 2 things. In German on the other hand, you can add some stuff like er or s to make plurals (Buch : Bücher = book : books) and you can make genitives a bit like English with s often (Buchs ≃ book's) but then, then you can also add other stuffs to make datives and accusatives (Büchern ~ (at) books or so). So people who do computations and science in languages look at this 4 > 2 things, and write well-received papers saying that yes our German is so complex and rich language now. Then the same researchers go and check Czech, and see that they have, like, 8 things to add and then claim that now this is really very rich and complex indeed. I'm not sure why, people who have learned complexity theory, here fail to recognize that between 2 and 8 (or 16) the order of magnitude actually stays the same, they probably do understand that in algorithm time complexities after all, why is morphological complexity different? As you might even have heard, languages like Finnish have about 15 things to add to nouns, making it one of the most cited over the top complex languages, but that's not the main point. Of course when making up words we apply more than one stuff at once, so yes, we can go (kirja : kirjat : kirjassa : kirjasta : kirjaan ... = book : books : in book :from book : to book...) to count up to approx 30 words, but then combine things around to go (kirjani : kirjassani : kirjako : kirjaniko : kirjassaniko : ... = my book : in my book : book? : my book? : in my book?) for 15×2×5×20 more combinations, so like, 6,600 different things. And with 6,600 we can say that order of magnitude has changed from 2, or 8, or 16. But wait, there's more: in comparison to world languages, Finnish is still very moderate in this kind of creativity, see, if you go to look at Navajo, Greenlandic (Kalaallisuut) or stuff like that, you can replace 6,600 with perhaps 100,000s and the way you count them starts to be difficult, this is also a change in order of magnitude however. So, why on earth, are the people whose play field is in number between 1 and 20 using hyperbole like rich, complex, when the scale of things is from 1 to 100,000s, maybe 1,000,000s, surely if you were a mathematician you wouldn't be picking numbers from 1 to 1,000,000 and then go: "yeah, this 2 is kind of a small number, but this 16, it's really really big, bigger than we can handle at the moment, we need more research and workshops about these big numbers like 16!!1"
So, what does this have to do with spicy food, you ask? Well, I just realized when explaining how jalapeno is not really very spicy, that it's the same kind of misjudgement that people with limited information and experiences make. See, there's an exact and scientific way to measure food spiciness with numbers called Scoville scale. As far as I understand, it assigns a number to a chili based on how much you need to do to make it as non-spicy as red bell pepper, that said red bell pepper is 0 on scoville scale. In Europe chilies are very new thing and still not readily available, so chances are you hear people saying things like, jalapenos are super spicy and I cannot eat such spicy food. Not only people, store brands as well, in Germany there's a lot of food that has stickers on them not only saying things like very spicy, ultra spicy and "not suitable for children", most of this stuff has jalapenos or milder, and only 0.1 % to 1 % of content at that. The thing here is, you might have guessed, jalapenos are around 2000 on scoville scale. And there's a whole range of chilies that go from 2000 to around 3,000,000 so there's a similar problem of exaggeration here, though generally more acceptable since the subjective experience of not having refined palate is not as bad as just being uninformed as scientist.
What I was really wondering though is, is there a term for this kind of scale error that people make when they misjudge things? It seems like something like would be useful in debating clubs or stuff like that.
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* this rant is very imprecise in its linguistics, because I just wrote up an example on the fly, I know that the morphologies of German and Czech are slightly more complex when you also consider other stuff than inflection of nouns and all that but the point is the same.
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