Mixed metaphor alert!
HumanProgress.org as recycled by Jacob Tudor:
The landline phone never reached more than 21.4% of the world’s population
By adopting cellular technology, developing countries were able to leapfrog that economic bottleneck.
Could it be that HumanProgress.org mixed this particular metaphor on purpose, to draw attention to the very good news they were trying to publicise, by getting mixed metaphor spotters like me all excited about how they’d said it?
Good news is notoriously hard to spread, because it typically happens so gradually.
I got into a muddle with linking to the original HumanProgress.org tweet, which is why I linked instead to Jacob Tudor’s rehashing of it. The original is number 75 of a set of 78 tweets, and linking to that gets you to the entire set, instead of linking to this particular one, so that link would only get you to this particular one while it remains the latest one.