You're so right, John!
Oh no! There goes another one......
Martin (No. 2)
Freelance Medical Statistician
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.....Einstein
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On Tuesday, 20 August 2019, 17:18:58 BST, John Whittington <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
At 15:00 20/08/2019, Martin Bland wrote:
>I am one native English speaker who would use "die" in everyday
>speech, but I am quite old! Pedantic, perhaps, but "pedantic" is
>what somebody who is wrong calls somebody who is right.
I am also old but, although there are certainly many 'evolutions of
language' that have occurred during my lifetime that irritate me
immensely, I cannot recall any time in the 65+ years I've been
speaking English when I would have used the word "die" (to mean the
singular of dice) in normal speaking. As Paul has said, with the
issue in question, the problem is that 'being right' (and being
accused of pedantic by those who are 'wrong') is that, unless it were
apparent from context, very few members of the general public would
actually undestand the meaning intended by the word - and language is
surely, above all else, about 'clear and effective communication'?
I have to say that, in terms of the 'irritations', I am one of those
people who (again probably due to age, but now the other way around),
whilst protesting that I speak English (not Latin), feel my teeth
standing on edge every time I read (or am 'forced' to write) the word
"data" being used as plural - to the extent that I often go out of my
way to use 'messy' (but undeniably singular!) alternatives to the
word - phrases like "numerical information", "set of numerical
values" (or equivalents for non-numerical data).
Kind Regards,
John
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