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> e.g. you probably aren't going to be murdered because no one has anything more effective than a plastic spork

Except for the occasional murder who has access to the flight controls.

“Occasional” implies a rate at least several orders of magnitude higher than actual.

if it happens once a decade occasional sounds right

So far this year alone, there have been 31,000,000 flights. https://www.airportia.com/flights-monitor/. So somewhere around 300,000,000 flights per decade.

If someone said an event happens “occasionally”, I would expect it to be significantly more frequent than 1/300,000,000.

Powerball lottery odds are 1 in 292 million. I wouldn’t say that I “occasionally” win the lottery when I buy a ticket!