Absolutely correct

03/04/13 03:13 [Wednesday]
I woke up about 2.30 AM and I can’t say this is the reason I was awake and couldn’t get back to sleep (that had more to do with the headache I had and discomfort in my tummy) but running constantly through my mind was the phrase ‘in-depth profile’. This phrase was used in a TV ad for a series of magazines when I was a teenager, and is troublesome in that a profile is an outline so how can it have depth? I was trying to think whether any meaning could be ascribed to ‘in-depth profile’ as I was waking up this morning.
Since I have got up I have been thinking about a sequence in The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon says one cannot be ‘more wrong’ because wrong is absolute: on a particular question one is either wrong or not wrong. And I have been thinking of other similar phrases used nowadays less strictly than really they ought to be: ‘more essential’ and ‘very key’.
The person replying to Sheldon on that matter in The Big Bang Theory (the comic store owner, I think) said it was a little wrong to say that a tomato is a vegetable but a lot wrong to say something else which I can’t recall but which was unarguably wrong or I should say more commonly declared wrong. Without getting too much into the question of the nature of truth and the nature of error, it is ‘unarguably wrong’ that a tomato is a vegetable but it is quite commonly thought to be right not wrong.
So for some qualities which are actually binary - either the case or not the case - there are associated measures of degree which seem natural. To say ‘more pregnant’ means in fact ‘further along in the pregnancy’. And for the case of wrongness there are as it were votes which could be taken showing what proportion of people realise (or ‘believe’) that the thing is wrong and what proportion believe it to be right.
If something is essential to something it is a necessary condition for it. Guessing what ‘more essential’ might mean (without having to hand a specific example) I suppose it means ‘more likely to fail if this condition is absent’, in which case the condition is not in truth essential but is simply important. Or possibly we can resort to voting again: perhaps we do not know whether this condition is essential but a certain large proportion of people believe the thing would fail without the condition.
I’m not quite sure what ‘key’ means not having thought through the etymology, but in ‘very key’ it means ‘important’ or ‘significant’. ‘Very key’ sounds wrong to me but it is quite a common phrase.
People like Sheldon Cooper (and Mrs Thatcher as she used to be) in coming to conclusions or decisions are very sure of them. Personally I think this is related to the way dopamine fires up in their central nervous systems, that is when dopaminergic neurons are excited they are very excited very suddenly and when they cease to be excited they cease suddenly (and this of course is related to schizophrenia). Commonly nowadays though individuals are not trusted: managers do not take decisions based on what they know to be the case but rather a questionnaire is sent out to determine what people on average believe to be the case. Hence I can understand the more frequent use nowadays of phrases like ‘more wrong’ which depend on the notion of what people on average believe instead of what is in truth the case.
Addendum
According to dictionary.reference.com (the online OED via the Dudley Council website being unavailable) key (as an adjective) means chief; major; important; essential; fundamental; pivotal. (I recommend also www.merriam-webster.com which I have discovered through the unavailability of the OED.) I should think the prior meaning of key is essential as a key is a sine qua non for getting through a door (or something else locked), and hence my doubts about ‘very key’ which is like saying ‘very essential’.
Nowadays the idea that anything is absolute is eroded, and even in physics the belief has become prevalent that there is not any absolute truth but only theories which come and go and for a while explain things quite well.