That's getting back to simply being lazy.
I'd interpret 'half of his age' as being half of 55 or 27.5 so nearly half of 27.5 is under 27.5.
Yes, but my point was for John who seems to think it is 'evolution' and a good thing whenever I point out such mistakes.
I think you really 'understand' and are just trying to 'get at me'
....Indeed it is - a 'pie chart' chops up a whole circle into bits, as one would do with an apple/whatever pie.
As I said, the alcoholic content of spirits used to be expressed as "percentage proof" - proof being the lowest concentratiion of alcohol (about 57%) that would 'burn'. "100% Proof" was therefore an alcohol concentration of about 57%. "110% proof would have been about 63%alcohol etc.
Definitely not - there is nothing remotely 'metric' about 2π
Indeed - expressing angles as radians is, mathematically, very useful for many purposes. An angle of 1 radian is the angle subtended at the middle of a circle by a length of its circumference equal to the radius of the circle (because the entire circumference is 2π times the radius).
As you've been told, it's a 'pie' chart (as in apple or steak pies), not a 'pi' one.
Indeed, but the size of the gill was (and is) the same in all three countries - the only difference being that the Scots wanted to drink a somewhat larger 'measure' of whiskey than did the English or Welsh!
I would say that, strictly speaking, it does have a meaning - but not the meaning I saw in a newspaper this morning! If 'half his age' is 27.5, then "nearly half his age" surely means 'a little less than 27.5", doesn't it?
Exactly - as I wrote before and have just written again. It does not mean (as the newspaper authors seemed to think) that her age was not quite 50% below his age!
No, I don't think so, but that's not quite the sort of wording we're talking about. I would personally think that "a quarter off 100" would be an unusual thing for anyone to say - much more likely something like "25% less than 100", isn't it?
True, although 'decimate' never has been an officially-defined unit - so a bit different.
Perhaps more importantly, working in radians makes calculus much easier, because it avoids annoying constants in the integration and differentiation formula.
I wouldn't necessarily say that it's a "good thing", but I do accept that it is an "inevitable thing" - and has been ever since a human being utter the first word of 'language'.
Quite so, which is why I wrote ...
(my subsequent explanation of what a radian represents in terms of the geometry of a circle was not intended to be an explanation as to why working with radians is 'mathematically useful')
I was - but I don't really understand your views .I think you really 'understand' and are just trying to 'get at me'
Why then, is it different than using any other word wrongly?
Well, it sort of has and is. It means a tenth - decimetre etc..
Probably the ignorant used the word wrongly then more copied them - the same as happens now when people spell and pronounce 'have' as 'of' or you using 'less' when it should be 'fewer'.
Only inevitable if not corrected.
I have answered several times saying if that were the case then that would be the norm and we would know no different - sort of obvious really.
You only say that on Fridays.... and it is Friday evening
OK so it's a typo and caught the 3 button instead of 4 but
That's just plain wrong ... half a pint is two gills, not one
I do my best to explain.
Again, I think you do really understand.
It presumably must have been something like that (as I wrote, seemingly best part of 400 years ago) - but I still find it hard to understand how such a degree of 'incorrectness' managed to 'catch on' to such a degree. It's a bit like having a situation in which increasing numbers of people came to use the word 'cold' to refer to something with a high temperature, to the eventually extent that it became accepted 'common usage'.
The former is an (I would say 'understandable') 'phonetic' thing. Particularly when "have" is abbreviated (to " 've' "), and given variations in voices/accents, verbalised versions of, say, "would've" and "would of" can be so difficult to distinguish that I'm not surprised that some have also come to write it incorrectly. As for the latter, and as you know, I am as much a culprit as anyone else (I have a habit of using those 'interchangeably'!) - but I agree that both those issues may have been avoided had people (including myself) been repeatedly 'corrected' at a fairly early stage in life.
As above, in terms of the English language there is not really any formal 'right' or 'wrong', so really nothing to 'correct' - the mostonec could really do would be to point out that something differed from current common usage.
That's not really an answer to my question. We know that such is not 'what happened' but I'm trying to get you to tell me whether you think that people should have been repeatedly 'corrected' whenever they used English in a manner which differed from what Chaucer (or whoever) would have used it, such that it would have happened, and we would all be speaking and writing "Chaucer's English" today.
Yes, as you illustrate, we are forever seeing things like "1/3 off" and "1/4 off", and that is very natural and very common wording - it was things like "1/3 off 100" and "1/4 off 100" which I was suggesting would be somewhat unusual (and uncommon) use of words.
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