Cristina
Rigutto
There is a very specific kind of distraction I’m particularly vulnerable to. Not breaking news, not political drama — semantics.
One morning, while half-awake and already negotiating with my first coffee, I was scrolling through the news when a headline stopped me mid-thumb: “Winter Forecast 2025: Early Projections Point to an Unusually Warm Christmas in Italy.” Now, a warm Christmas? Fine. At this point the climate has been freelancing for years. But “forecast” and “projection” in the same sentence? That’s where my brain — professionally trained to overthink words — decided we had a problem.
To most people, this probably sounds like an unnecessary level of attention to detail. And maybe it is. But I’ve spent enough time explaining science to know that those two words, which seem comfortably interchangeable, actually sit on opposite sides of a very thin line — the kind of line you don’t notice until you cross it and suddenly the meaning shifts under your feet.
A projection is, in essence, obedient: it takes a pattern and extends it forward. If I’ve spent €50 a week on groceries for six months, I can project that I’ll spend €2,600 in a year. It’s not a promise, not even a prediction in the intuitive sense — just arithmetic continuing in a straight line, assuming nothing interferes.
A forecast, on the other hand, is where that straight line starts to bend. Because a forecast doesn’t just extend what we already know — it builds a narrative around what might change. It assumes that inflation will move prices, that geopolitical tensions will ripple into energy costs, that transport will become more expensive, and that supply chains will behave, as they often do, like slightly unreliable acquaintances.
A forecast is an informed story about the future, grounded in models but inevitably shaped by assumptions. And that shift — from extending a pattern to interpreting a system — is subtle, but not trivial. It’s the moment where we move from calculation into interpretation, and interpretation is where perception begins to quietly bend.
Something very similar happens with another pair of words that often travel together and get treated as if they were interchangeable: possibility and probability. They sound close enough to pass in casual conversation, but they operate on entirely different levels.
Possibility is binary — something either can happen or it cannot. It’s about the existence of the door.
Probability, instead, is about how likely it is that someone will actually walk through it. Saying that a tornado might hit a city tells us that the door exists. Saying there’s a 70% chance it will happen this week tells us that we should probably stop philosophising about doors and start looking for a basement.
When we blur that distinction, we don’t just make language slightly less precise — we reshape how risk is perceived. And risk, despite how often we treat it as a technical concept, is deeply emotional. It influences whether we dismiss something, worry about it, or take action.
The words we choose are not neutral labels; they are cues that guide interpretation, often without us realising it.
The same mechanism applies, perhaps even more subtly, when we move from words to the words we use to describe numbers. Because what shapes our understanding is often not the number itself, but the label attached to it.
Terms like absolute and relative sound technical, almost interchangeable, yet they quietly frame how we interpret magnitude and change. An “absolute risk” grounds us in scale; a “relative increase” emphasises difference. Both can be correct, but they do very different things cognitively. In practice, we don’t react to numbers — we react to how those numbers are described. And that description is never neutral: it guides attention, amplifies certain aspects, and quietly fades others into the background.
Consider a simple example: “In Italy, 5% of people risk developing a respiratory disease due to air pollution. In Milan, the risk is 18%.” At first glance, this sounds alarming. The difference feels large enough to trigger concern, maybe even urgency. But that reaction depends entirely on how we interpret the second number. If that 18% is read as an absolute value, Milan suddenly appears dramatically more dangerous. If, instead, we understand it as a relative increase — 18% higher than the national average — the picture changes significantly. In absolute terms, the increase is from 5% to 5.9% – less than one percentage point.
The data hasn’t changed, but the story it tells — and the emotion it triggers — is completely different.
And then there is another word that quietly complicates things further: incidence.
Because saying that “5% of people are affected” is not the same as saying that “5% of people develop the condition each year.” Incidence is about new cases — about how fast something is spreading through a population over time. It adds a temporal dimension that prevalence, or overall risk, does not capture. Two places can have the same number of total cases, but very different incidence rates — one stable, the other rapidly increasing.
And those are two very different stories. One suggests persistence; the other suggests acceleration. One invites monitoring; the other demands attention.
This is where communication becomes less about transmitting information and more about navigating responsibility. Because every choice we make — every word, every number, every comparison — carries an implicit framing. And that framing shapes perception as much as, if not more than, the data itself.
The question is no longer just whether we are being accurate, but how that accuracy is being experienced.
There isn’t a simple answer to that tension. Only a continuous balancing act between clarity and impact, between precision and persuasion. And often, it starts with something as small — and as easy to overlook — as the difference between a projection and a forecast.