I need help with something. The way I learned math, the word "percent" refers to some portion of a whole. per cent. In other words, if we imagine the whole being divided into 100 equal parts ("cents"), "x percent" refers to some number of those parts (x out of 100, or x per cent). Notice that I'm talking about single entities here, not collections of wholes (as in "there are 570 percent more attorneys in this country than any free society can reasonably sustain").

The logic is inescapable, right?

So will someone please alert the sports world? Go to a search engine and type in "give 110 percent." Or just go to this google page.

See what I mean? How can anyone "give 110 percent?" Now granted, someone can give 110 percent more than he did yesterday, or 110 percent more than someone else, but he can't give more than his ultimate capacity, which is mathematically limited to 100 percent.

I know, athletes and the people who report on them aren't the most eloquent members of society. Just this weekend I heard some football announcer refer to how "incredulous" a play was. But this percent trend is especially distressing for two reasons. First, sports are the last domain in American society where math is allowed free reign. You want to be starting quarterback? Let's see your passing statistics. You want to play shortstop? Let's look at how many errors you made last year.

On the other hand, if you want to get into graduate school, sure, we'll look at your grades and GRE scores, but we also want to examine the color of your skin. If you are the right color, we'll throw the math out the window. We are so obsessed with creating a sheen of gender, ethnicity, and lifestyle diversity in every walk of life that we willfully ignore (as quietly as possible) objective data when it intrudes on our idyllic social image. We have busied ourselves, in other words, with converting opportunities into entitlements based on genetic make-up, which is, come to think of it, exactly what our inbred royal European ancestors used to do.

In the world of sports, however, we don't tolerate this kind of nonsense. Sure, it nips at the edges; there are girls wrestling in high school, while men's college wrestling (a real sport, in contrast to, say, soccer) programs are disbanded so that there aren't too many more male scholarship athletes than female scholarship athletes. But by and large, in sports we let the numbers speak for themselves.

The second problem with this "110 percent" business is that it has no upper limit. If the opposing coach says that his players are going to give "110 percent," it's only logical that you say your players are ready to give "120 percent." I haven't found anyone who claims to give "1000 percent" yet, but I did find one athlete, a downhill mountain biker (anyone surprised?) who claims to give "200 percent."

This has to stop, or one day we'll hear some coach tell us how his team gave a "googleplex percent out there today." Please, write your congressman, and help stop the madness.