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Assume v. Presume

I had a Welsh maths lecturer at university who had a thick accent and kept talking about a turn of the 20th century French mathematician called Plank Harry! :o_O:
 
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Trev said:
bison: two male offsprings
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What is the plural of offspring?


From the 16c. to the early 19c. a plural form offsprings was current but since then this ancient word (found already in OE) has been invariable in form (Fowler's Modern English Usage).

USAGE EXAMPLES :

  • The widows and the offsprings of the poorer, the indigent clergy (1756)
  • These are the offspring of Muslim parents; the son tried to become the worthy offspring of his famous father.
  • Better to start when the offspring are young and will have no solid memories of particularly rough times.(Washington Times, May 27, 2015)
  • The Norway rat has a three-week gestation period and can produce five litters a year, each with four to eight offspring. (The Verge,May 13, 2015)
 
I just found myself stumbling over a spelling and had to look it up: wholly. Is that a very odd construction from whole, or am I missing a pattern?
 
Black Hole said:
I just found myself stumbling over a spelling and had to look it up: wholly. Is that a very odd construction from whole, or am I missing a pattern?
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The etymology looks interesting (ie. complicated and uncertain) but it does look too be simply a contraction of wholely.
 
prpr said:
Heard on a BBC regional news tonight, something like:
"The water temperature was 10 degrees, the air temperature was three times colder".
WTF does that actually mean?
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And another one tonight on my local one:

"This water's about half the temperature of a normal swimming pool - it's about 15 degrees..."
 
Would anyone say that one place was twice the longitude of another? That Miami was half the longitude of Honolulu?
 
prpr said:
This water's about half the temperature of a normal swimming pool
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Mike0001 said:
Would anyone say that one place was twice the longitude of another? That Miami was half the longitude of Honolulu?
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Neither is unreasonable if the user is meaning to speak relative to the 0 values of the respective systems.
In centigrade the zero is to many people the coldest they relate to - once you have ice and snow going colder doesn't actually change things much, so multiplying up from that does make some sense. In the Fahrenheit system it really doesn't, at least when talking about human survivable values.
In navigational terms Honolulu is about twice as far round the earth from Greenwich as Miami. It's not something that you'd hear as often as the temperature one, but then people generally talk about the temperature most days, but very rarely talk about navigational dimensions.
 
Sorry, but you're wrong.
You fundamentally cannot divide or multiply temperatures like you can with distances.
 
prpr said:
Sorry, but you're wrong.
You fundamentally cannot divide or multiply temperatures like you can with distances.
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Any physicists out there? What if the temperatures are in Kelvin? Re. the swimming pool example, could you say that at 15°C (288.15K) the water is about 95% of the temperature of a typical swimming pool (presumably at 30°C or 303.15K)?
 
This very subject came up on More Or Less (BBC Radio 4), where their metier is to be as pedantic about the public use of statistics as we are about language.

There was a flurry of responses from the "loyal listeners" when a statement (in a public safety / life saving context) said something like the sea temperature at 9 degrees is a third the temperature of a swimming pool at 30 degrees (I may not have remembered the details exactly), resulting in a much greater risk of hypothermia/exposure if you find yourself immersed in it.

The arguments were as above, but Tim Hartford defended the original speaker as not having a scientific background (therefore no knowledge of thermodynamics), and it was in accord with public perception. I subsequently wrote in saying that the rate of heat loss from a body is proportional to the temperature difference to the environment and the specific heat capacity of the environmental medium - so it would make sense (in this context) to take body temperature as the datum (37 degrees), and thus the chill effect of being immersed in the sea is nearly four times greater than in a heated pool.

Thermodynamically, MET is correct - but what matters in any such case of comparing number is the magnitude of the practical effect.
 
I am quite happy with using expressions such as half/third the temperature etc. but not twice as cold/three times colder etc. That's just plain stupid and meaningless
 
prpr said:
Sorry, but you're wrong.
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I didn't claim to be right - I said "Neither is unreasonable" which is pretty much what BH has filled out on a couple of posts later. Technically they are wrong (though if you substitute 'has' for 'was' in the longitude case that is correct) but in everyday use they are reasonably descriptive of the situation as perceived by most humans.
But I agree with Trev in the above ... and we covered that a little while back IIRC.
 
Trev said:
I am quite happy with using expressions such as half/third the temperature etc. but not twice as cold/three times colder etc. That's just plain stupid and meaningless
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Only for °K. Otherwise, it is bull.
 
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