“ I remember being astonished at the (implausible) scientific precision of the language of American weather forecasts when I moved to California: “a low of 61 and a high of 69″, they would say, before giving the exact probability of rainfall (“70% likelihood of precipitation”), and perhaps adding a parts-per-billion pollution index. In Britain it’s all “scattered showers and bright intervals” or “cloudy with rain in parts, but a bit nicer later on”. Saying “pretty miserable by and large” for the entire country is only very slightly less precise than some of the more official weather forecasts by actual weathercasters.
