Statistics, languages and human psychology

We always read about Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and more recently, Elon Musk. The world must be full of billionaires. We rarely read about average Joe. There must be very few average people out there. However, if you do a simple statistics, it is easy to find out that the opposite is true. The outstanding are the few who stand out from the crowd. The average is indeed quite average. The mean is indeed quite mean. The median is indeed quite mediocre.

However, you don’t want to tell an average Joe he is mean or mediocre. Otherwise, he will be really mean to you. But language does convey something truly meaningful. The meaning of something is its mean. The meaning of life? It is to be mean.