Before entering fully into the meaning of the improbable term, 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 that language:
-The prefix “in-”, which means “no”.
-The verb “prove”, which is synonymous with “examine” and even “rehearse”.
-The suffix “-able”, which is used to indicate “that you can”.
The improbable is that which cannot be proven or which is implausible. The adjective can be used to qualify what is unlikely to happen or be proven.
For example: "The improbable success of the initiative led me to move away from my partner" , "The leader expressed that a championship with more than thirty teams is unlikely" , "For the economist, compliance with the inflation target that was set the government is highly unlikely ” .
Many are the terms that can be used synonymously with 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, feasible, feasible, easy or presumed.
In general, the improbable is linked to what has little chance of being realized or being true. Suppose the selected German of football faces the selection of Malaysia. For analysts, Malaysia is unlikely to get a good result: the difference in level between the two teams is so great that it would be a surprise if Germany did not win by at least three or four goals difference.
Take the case of the president of a country that assumes an unemployment rate of the 12% and aims to reduce it to the 5% in one year. When, after eight months, unemployment barely fell to 11%, experts see it unlikely that the goal set by the president can be achieved.
Sometimes the hypothetical is unlikely. One sportswriter argues 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, since Pippen was Jordan's partner in all his achievements with the Bulls, there is no way to know what would have happened to another reality.
In the same way, we cannot ignore the existence of different cultural works that have in their titles the word that we are now analyzing. A good example of this is the book "The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable." It was published in 2011 by writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
It is an essay, which has been translated into more than thirty languages and which comes to address as 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' that are analyzed in the work are from the 9/11 attacks to the success of Internet spaces such as YouTube.