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Post by Paul Doherty on Jul 4, 2008 17:01:21 GMT
Call me fickle, Pete! Depends on the question, really. If someone wants to know the best way to say something, I'd happily suggest a recasting. If someone wants to know why something is how it is, suggesting a recasting doesn't help. Sometimes it's hard to know which type of question it is! This may be an unwarranted digression, but I think they are the same. In the main, the real question should be, "How do I communicate this concept unambiguously and clearly?" Sometime the answer is to punctuate properly, sometimes it's a syntax issue and sometimes the real answer is to write it a different way (a bit like the old joke about not starting from here). Well, that's one type of question. The other type is my fruit salad one: "can I write there is one banana and two apples in it?" I don't really want a practical answer to a menu problem -- I do of course realise that I could write "it contains one banana and two apples", so a recasting suggestion isn't what I'm after. I want to know whether people think it's correct English, and why (or why not). Quite a lot of questions here are like that, in my view. |
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Post by SusanB on Jul 4, 2008 18:12:23 GMT
I'm also interested in the 'why' of it.
(On the bananas/apples example, I still haven't worked out why I might say 'are', while also considering 'are' to be ungrammatical. It doesn't make sense - or perhaps I don't make sense. I'm certainly not self-consistent.)
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Post by Geoff on Jul 5, 2008 12:30:21 GMT
I'm also interested in the 'why' of it. (On the bananas/apples example, I still haven't worked out why I might say 'are', while also considering 'are' to be ungrammatical. It doesn't make sense - or perhaps I don't make sense. I'm certainly not self-consistent.) Sue, could I suggest you go back to the Quick Language Questions board and re-read the two Verb and number agreement threads. If you're still none the wiser, then return here. I agree that at first glance you might expect to use, or see, the plural verb, but there are reasons, covered in the aforementioned threads, for using the singular verb. |
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Post by Tone on Jul 5, 2008 20:39:28 GMT
Geoff, >then return here<Er, where else could she return to?  Tone |
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Post by Geoff on Jul 6, 2008 2:11:10 GMT
Picky, Tone, picky.  |
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Post by Paul Doherty on Jul 6, 2008 2:13:46 GMT
To the Quick Language Questions board?
Geoff's post would have been less clear without the here; like for free, it's a good example of how blindly following "the rules" isn't always a good idea.
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Post by SusanB on Jul 6, 2008 16:22:42 GMT
She did go back to the two threads mentioned. And she has returned (here) still not sure why she uses a construction (the version with 'are'), even though she disagrees with its accuracy - in line with many of the reasons given in the threads.
However, that discussion has resolved itself. I'll continue to ponder my inconsistency, and will report back if I ever manage to account for it. In the meantime there are many new things to think about!
Susan.
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Post by Tone on Jul 6, 2008 20:33:21 GMT
Geoff, >Picky, Tone, picky.<Yeah! Fun, though, wannit.  Tone |
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Post by SusanB on Jul 16, 2008 22:20:07 GMT
I've just read the following (complete) sentence:
"Not a few were offended."
This was with reference to something somebody had written.
I can't work out what it is supposed to mean. Can someone recast it for me? Were none offended? Were many offended? Is this an obvious phrase or idiom I've just not come across before?
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Post by Paul Doherty on Jul 16, 2008 22:58:44 GMT
"Many were offended"?
I'd say it's not an accepted idiom, and is very unclear (like the lawyer's question "is it not true that you were unaware of the prohibition?")
But I'd guess it's an attempt at ironic negative understatement, as in "I was not unamused".
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Post by Verbivore on Jul 17, 2008 1:19:29 GMT
[...] "Not a few were offended." Such expressions have been common to my ear/eye for as long as I can remember, so - at least in my circles in Oz - it must be some kind of standard usage. My interpretation of it would be "considerably more than a few were offended". I avoid using it, though, because of its ambiguity. |
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Post by Paul Doherty on Jul 17, 2008 2:37:32 GMT
"considerably more than a few" -- is that not "many" ?
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Post by Verbivore on Jul 17, 2008 8:51:24 GMT
"considerably more than a few" -- is that not "many" ? No, Paul, not necessarily. A few is - at least in Oz - traditionally regarded as being between three and eight *, or at least a smallish number. Eight are not many out of a hundred, for example (though might be many out of ten), so "considerably more than a few" might be, say, 15, 20, even 100 - but when does a number of things become "many"? It's all relative, surely. * Never to my knowledge defined as such in dictionaries, but certainly a "given" in my generation's schooling - and still regarded that way by some not-yet-dead people. |
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Post by Paul Doherty on Jul 17, 2008 9:05:04 GMT
but when does a number of things become "many"? When it's more than a few! And certainly when it's "considerably" more than a few. |
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Post by Dave M on Jul 17, 2008 10:02:06 GMT
I'm with Paul: we might have "a few" of something, and at the other end we might have "many". There may (or may not) be a gap between the two, but as soon as you move to considerably more than a few, you're into "many".
If you ask someone how many constitute "a few", you'll get answers that involve 3 or so. But when you add context and scale, the applicability varies:
We remembered to book places for Janet and John, but forgot that they have a few children - unlikely to be eight (or we'd say something like "so many children")
Fourteen million cases of the common cold were investigated, but only a few turned out to involve the person having recently had a chill - we might expect 43 to count as "a few".
Each of the flats has three bedrooms, but take-up was low. The company only later found that people in that area tended to have many children - what, more than eight?
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