More or less

 I'm asked what "more or less" means and I say "about," "approximately." But, "I can speak English, more or less."

That's a nice example because more or less has a slightly different flavor there.

In "It's more or less ten miles away," it means approximately, about, roughly.

But in "I can speak English, more or less," it means something closer to to some extent, after a fashion, sort of, or well enough, though not perfectly.

The phrase often softens a statement by admitting that it isn't completely true or accurate.

So:

    "The job is more or less finished." = It is finished in all important respects, though there may be a few details left.

    "They're more or less the same." = Similar enough that the differences don't matter much.

    "I can speak English, more or less." = I can speak English reasonably well, but not fluently or perfectly.

The underlying idea is the same in all cases: close enough for the present purpose, but not exactly.

This is one of those expressions whose meaning is often easier to grasp as a general attitude than as a precise dictionary definition. It conveys, "What I just said is true, but with some qualifications."

I don't suppose the phrase has a particular history since to a native speaker it seems to defined itself.

You're right that more or less feels almost self-explanatory to an English speaker. It is one of those phrases whose meaning seems to emerge naturally from the words themselves: either "more" than the exact truth or "less" than it, but close enough.

Historically, it is very old. English has had forms of more or less since the Middle Ages, and it originally meant much what it does today: "in greater or smaller degree," "to some extent," or "approximately." The phrase appears in Middle English texts and became common in Early Modern English. There does not seem to have been a dramatic shift in meaning or some colorful origin story behind it.

What's interesting is that the phrase survives because it fills a useful niche. If I say, "I speak French," that's a strong claim. If I say, "I speak French poorly," that's quite negative. But "I speak French, more or less" conveys competence with uncertainty—a kind of linguistic shrug. English has many such hedges (sort of, kind of, roughly, pretty much), but more or less is unusually flexible because it can refer either to quantity ("about ten miles") or degree ("I can manage it, more or less").

In that sense, the phrase's longevity may come precisely from the fact that it feels self-defining. Speakers don't need to learn an idiomatic meaning that differs from the words; they instinctively understand that reality is often "more or less" rather than exact.

Exactly. Geometric facts in a given geometry are interconnected. If circles started misbehaving because space was curved, you would expect many other Euclidean theorems to fail in consistent ways.

For example, in Euclidean geometry:
60.0∘+60.0∘+60.0∘=180∘60.0∘+60.0∘+60.0∘=180∘
Drag any vertex to change the triangle. The angle labels update automatically and always add to 180 degrees.
60.0°
60.0°
60.0°

The angles of a triangle add to 180°. On a sphere they add to more than 180°; on a negatively curved surface they add to less than 180°.

Likewise, if the circumference of a large circle differs from 2πr2πr, then other geometric relationships would also be altered. Parallel lines would behave differently, areas would scale differently, and the familiar Euclidean formulas would need correction terms.

In fact, measuring the sum of the angles of very large triangles was one of the classical ways of testing whether physical space is Euclidean. If you make a triangle from three mountain peaks, the expected deviation from 180° due to Earth's curvature is tiny but measurable.

What is elegant about modern differential geometry is that all these discrepancies are manifestations of the same underlying thing: curvature. You don't need a separate explanation for circles and triangles. Once you know the curvature, the deviations in all geometric measurements follow together.

So if someone announced, "I've found a circle whose circumference-to-radius ratio isn't π," one of the first questions physicists would ask is exactly the one you're implying: "What happens to triangles in the same region?" If triangles still summed to 180° and all the other Euclidean relationships held perfectly, then the anomaly would be much harder to explain by ordinary curvature and would point toward something even stranger.

That is one reason science tends to trust a web of mutually supporting measurements. A single odd result is interesting. A whole constellation of geometric facts shifting together is evidence that you have discovered a new feature of reality rather than merely a measurement error.

Well, I would say the opposite, that it's probably a measurement error, and you should make the measurement a few more times, preferably using different equipment.

Yes, and that is exactly what a good scientist would say.

There's an old saying often attributed to physicists: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A single measurement that suggests π is "wrong" would be met not with celebration but with skepticism.

The first questions would be mundane:

    Is the instrument calibrated?

    Has anyone repeated the measurement?

    Was the circle really circular?

    Is there an unnoticed systematic error?

    Can an independent group reproduce the result?

History strongly favors this attitude. Most anomalies disappear under closer scrutiny. A loose cable, an unaccounted-for temperature effect, a software bug, a mistaken assumption about the apparatus—science is littered with such stories.

Only after repeated measurements by independent investigators, using different techniques and equipment, continued to show the same discrepancy would people begin looking for new physics.

In fact, that's why I mentioned the "constellation of geometric facts." If one measurement of a circle disagreed with π, I'd bet on experimental error. If dozens of laboratories found the same discrepancy, and then triangle-angle measurements, gravitational measurements, and other geometric tests all pointed in the same direction, confidence would gradually shift.

The discovery process is usually not:

    Weird result.

    New theory.

It is more often:

    Weird result.

    Check everything.

    Check everything again.

    Ask someone else to check.

    Discover a mistake.

And only occasionally:

    Weird result.

    Years of scrutiny.

    The result survives.

    Textbooks are rewritten.

Your instinct is very much the conservative scientific one. Given a choice between "my measurement is wrong" and "geometry has failed," the former wins almost every time. The reason the latter would cause such excitement is precisely because it would have survived every attempt to explain it away.

Sweeping out the pigeon spoor from the antenna did not fix the anomoly.

A perfect example!

You're alluding to the discovery of the cosmic microwave background by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. They were using a horn antenna and found a persistent excess noise signal that they couldn't get rid of.

Being good experimentalists, they did not leap to "We've discovered evidence for the Big Bang." They assumed something was wrong with the equipment.

They checked electronics, checked calculations, looked for interference sources, and, famously, investigated what they politely described as "white dielectric material" deposited by pigeons living in the antenna. The pigeons were removed, the antenna cleaned, and the signal remained.

That story is beloved among scientists precisely because it illustrates the attitude you've been describing. The first response to an anomaly is not excitement but suspicion. One earns the right to be excited only after exhausting the boring explanations.

What's even better is that the signal was not especially dramatic. It wasn't a giant flashing beacon from the cosmos. It was an annoying bit of excess noise that stubbornly refused to go away. The universe often announces its deepest secrets in the form of what initially looks like an equipment malfunction.

Had Penzias and Wilson been careless, they might have ignored the anomaly. Had they been reckless, they might have proclaimed a revolutionary discovery too early. Instead they did what good experimenters do: they kept trying to make the anomaly disappear.

When it wouldn't, people started paying attention. That's the point at which a discrepancy becomes interesting. Not when it first appears, but when it survives every reasonable attempt to kill it.