Decorative statistics and historical records

Sean Manning points to this remark from Matthew “not the musician” White:

I [White] am sometimes embarrassed by where I have been forced to find my statistics … Often, the only place to find numbers is in a newspaper article, almanac, chronicle or encyclopedia which needs to summarize major events into a few short sentences or into one scary number, and occasionally I get the feeling that some writers use numbers as pure rhetorical flourishes. To them, “over a million” does not mean “>10⁶”; it’s just synonymous with “a lot”.

White was sooooo close to picking up on the concept of decorative statistics.