Some people say that equal is an absolute term, that is, that two quantities either are or are not equal and that equal therefore cannot be qualified in degree. Accordingly, it is illogical to speak of making a more equal allocation of resources among the departments. But in an earlier survey 71 percent of the Usage Panel accepted this example. Was the panel being illogical?
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People who object to the more equal usage assume that mathematics and logic provide a model of accuracy that is appropriate to the everyday use of language. This supposition also underlies traditional grammatical discussions of other words, such as unique, parallel, and center. According to this account, equal has its “precise” or “literal” meaning in the use of the equal sign in an arithmetic expression such as 5 + 2 = 7, and more ordinary uses of equal, though they may be permissible, represent “loose” or “imprecise” extensions of the mathematical sense.
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In fact the mathematical concept of equality is a poor model for using the word equal to describe relations between things in the world. As applied to such things, statements of equality are always relative to an implicit standard of tolerance. When someone says The two boards are of equal length, we assume that the equality is reckoned to some order of approximation determined by the needs of the situation. Thus the boards are not perfectly equal, just equal enough to be useful or acceptable for building a window frame or making some other object. If we did not think this way, we would always speak of physical objects such as boards as nearly equal, since true mathematical equality is unattainable with any measuring device.
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What is more, we often speak of the equality of things that cannot be measured quantitatively, as when we say The college draft was introduced in an effort to make the teams in the National Football League as equal as possible or The candidates for the job should all be given equal consideration. In all such cases, equality is naturally a gradient notion and can be modified in degree. You can tell this from the existence of the word unequal. The prefix un- attaches only to gradient adjectives: we say unmanly but not unmale; and the word uneven can be applied to a surface (whose evenness may be a matter of degree) but not to a number (whose evenness is an either/or affair). For more on absolute terms, see
absolute terms under Grammar.
