Before entering fully into the meaning of the term improbable, we are going to proceed to know its etymological origin. In this case, we have to establish that it derives from Latin and that it is the result of the union of three lexical components of said language:
-The prefix “in-”, which means “no”.
-The verb “probare”, which is synonymous with “examine” and even “rehearse”.
-The suffix “-able”, which is used to indicate “that it is possible”.
The improbable is that which cannot be proven or that is implausible . The adjective can be used to describe what is unlikely to happen or be demonstrated .
For example: “The improbable success of the initiative led me to distance myself from my partner” , “The leader expressed that a championship with more than thirty teams is unlikely” , “For the economist, compliance with the inflation goal that was set government is highly unlikely.”
There are many terms that can be used as synonyms for improbable and among those are the following: uncertain, doubtful, equivocal, confusing, difficult, insecure or remote, for example.
On the contrary, among its antonyms are words such as probable, possible, certain, foreseeable, viable, feasible, easy or presumed.
Generally, the improbable is linked to what has little chance of happening or being true . Suppose the German soccer team faces the Malaysian team. For analysts, it is unlikely that Malaysia will obtain a good result: the difference in level between the two teams is so great that it would be a surprise if Germany does not win by at least three or four goals difference.
Let's take the case of the president of a country who takes office with an unemployment rate of 12% and proposes to reduce it to 5% in one year. When, after eight months, unemployment barely fell to 11% , experts find it unlikely that the objective set by the president can be achieved.
Sometimes the hypothetical is improbable. A sports journalist maintains that, if Scottie Pippen had not played for the Chicago Bulls between 1987 and 1998 , Michael Jordan could not have won six NBA rings. This hypothesis is unlikely since, given that Pippen was Jordan 's teammate in all his achievements with the Bulls , there is no way to know what would have happened in another reality.
In the same way, we cannot ignore the existence of different cultural works that have the word we are now analyzing in their titles. A good example of this is the book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” It was published in 2011 by the writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
It is an essay, which has been translated into more than thirty languages and which addresses how improbable situations or events, the so-called black swans, have specific consequences that then try to be explained without taking into account factors such as chance.
Among the "black swans" analyzed in the work range from the 9/11 attacks to the success of Internet spaces such as YouTube.