sustainability

Demi asked me to post this.

IMO there’s a very big problem with the word “sustainability”, unless it’s used to mean “can be sustained indefinitely”, which is practically never what anyone means by it.

The thing is that it’s gramatically a success-or-failure dichotomy, but people don’t use it like that, which would be okay except: when they use it to mean “a bit more sustainable” that can be in any of a zillion different directions, some of which are not important and many of which are cancelled out by other factors (which would not be a problem if it was a success-or-failure dichotomy. because you can’t honestly claim dichotomous success unless you’ve considered all the relevant factors).