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Assume v. Presume

Contrary to my previous ramblings about split infinitives, I heard one this afternoon which raised my hackles:

"she absolutely did!"

In the same item (Weekend Woman's Hour, Radio4), there was a clear mispronunciation of "have" as "of", which is leading to the widespread misspelling in the less educated classes. I believe it derives from the reasonable contraction of "should have" to "should've" becoming mispronounced "should of", and from there the general substitution of "of" for "have".
 
Here's another one, committed in general (not only by the uneducated):

"I'll try and do that"

"I'll try to do that", please. If one knows one is going to succeed, "try" is irrelevant. If one doesn't know one will succeed, "and" is an inexactitude.
 
Oh dear. A Discovery Channel programme How the Universe Works has made it onto Quest tonight. They started out looking at stars, and pointed out that our Sun is a star, and that it is big enough to contain a million Earths (fair enough, the Earth:Sun ratio of diameters is about 1:109). However, they then went on to say that the largest star known (VY Canis Majoris) is a billion times bigger than the Sun.

I don't think so. A billion times the volume, maybe.

Next we had an animation of star formation. Apparently the proto-stellar disc condenses under gravity (OK so far), and in the process of heating to the point where nuclear fusion can kick off, sends out cosmic jets along the spin axis. What?? Wherever did they get that from??? (My degree is in astrophysics, BTW)

And they are pronouncing Betelgeuse "beetle juice". Bloody Americans!
 
If you describe one object as twice the size (or twice as big), I would (as common usage) expect that to refer to linear dimension unless otherwise qualified. Do others not agree?

In this example, I suspect they have chosen a billion rather than a thousand for the hyperbole.
 
Not much difference there then.
When binoculars are advertised in the press, they use expressions such as '100 times magnification' for a pair of 10x50 which is using area instead of linear because the area is bigger (or is it smaller).:frantic:
 
selectortone said:
I heard a BBC news reporter call an aeroplane an 'airplane' the other day. What is the world coming to?
Click to expand...
To its senses as the former technically refers to just the wing and the latter was first used in the 19th century and is still used in the USA for fixed-wing aircraft.
 
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