It's not just that -- if the tail of the distribution doesn't seem to fit, you can just call it a "power-law with a cutoff", "exponential tail", "multiple scali

It's not just that -- if the tail of the distribution doesn't seem to fit, you can just call it a "power-law with a cutoff", "exponential tail", "multiple scaling regimes", "piecewise linear" or some other cruft. Physicists, particularly, are egregious abusers of this. Like Agent Mulder, they want to believe.