Once Over Lightly

GEE WHIZ DEPT. There is a type of writing called Gee Whiz. You've all been exposed to it even if you didn't recognize it for what it is. The main element in Gee Whiz writing is statistics written to impress the reader with either size, quantity or speed, etc. You could say something like "Washington has 3,500,000 bureaucrats" (if it were true, which it may be) but the Gee Whiz author would come up with, "The bureaucrats in Washington, if they were laid in a row head to foot, would nearly stretch from Washington to Hawaii."