3 ms·

It’s a colloquialism and means whatever is possible [and necessary]. When a company says they will do “everything possible,” the statement is not wrong because

• lultimouomo 8y ago
  It's more like whatever we think appropriate. Why don't they say so? Because it has a clear meaning, while everything possible suggests they will go out of their way, without actually promising it. I think it's only fair to call them out on these weasel words.
  • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    Yet if they said "we will do what we feel is appropriate" then people would be bitching and moaning about them not doing "everything possible". There is no winning when making a statement to the public in a situation like this.
    • everybodyknows 8y ago
      Right. Most of the public can't handle hard truth, so the de facto job description of "spokespersons" is now to obfuscate with such skill that we all get as little hard truth as possible.
• cptskippy 8y ago
  Let's be clear, when they say "everything possible" they actually mean "the absolute minimum necessary to appease". The reality is that "possible" is contextualized by business constraints of costs and profits, not the hypothetical money is no object "possible". The purposefully use ambiguous language with the intent to mislead most people into a pie-in-the-sky interpretation rather than one with constraints. The English language is highly contextual, ambiguous, and open to interpretation which is why there are subsets (lexicons? dialects?) of the language used by difference disciples with clearly defined terms to avoid these ambiguities.