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Assume v. Presume

af123 said:
Which bit do you disagree with? I'm objecting to the 'in T minus 10 minutes' which makes no sense.
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You are preparing for it at T-9 minutes, T-8 minutes, ... , T-1 minute, and are presumably totally on the ride at time T, having prepared for all that time.:D
 
af123 said:
I'm happy that I can prepare for it at T-9 minutes but not in T-9 minutes.
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What if T = 2 * xx? ;)

(Sorry, still in ultra-pedantic mode! I agree with what you say, but am not allowed to admit it. Except I just did...)
 
People who use disinterested when they mean uninterested really annoy me. The words mean totally different things.
 
michael.h said:
Re Sluggish EPG on HDR-FOX T2/GB/RE boxes.
I attempted to raise this with Humax, however, the person I spoke to seem very disinterested stating that he did not know of a problem. I was so incensed by the could not care less type attitude I entered a complaint on Humax Facebook . Has anyone else contacted Humax about this problem?
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That is uninterested not disinterested Michael! Disinterested means impartial, like a judge should be. Uninterested more closely matches your description of not caring less. :disagree:
 
Mike0001 said:
That is uninterested not disinterested Michael! Disinterested means impartial, like a judge should be. Uninterested more closely matches your description of not caring less. :disagree:
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Interesting :)

I have reached the ripe old age of 46 without realising there was such a word as uninterested (sounds so clumsy to my ear) so had to look it up after reading that. The OED has this to say:

Nowhere are the battle lines more deeply drawn in usage questions than over the difference between disinterested and uninterested. According to traditional guidelines, disinterested should never be used to mean ‘not interested’ (i.e. it is not a synonym for uninterested) but only to mean ‘impartial’, as in the judgements of disinterested outsiders are likely to be more useful. Ironically, the earliest recorded sense of disinterested is for the disputed sense. Today, the ‘incorrect’ use of disinterested is widespread: around a quarter of citations in the Oxford English Corpus for disinterested are for this sense.

Thanks for teaching me something! To my mind a person who does not have an interest (disinterested) is the same as a person who is not interested (uninterested) but clearly I am wrong (at least as far as tradition is concerned).
 
I think that the use of interested in disinterested refers to interest as meaning have a share of, rather than being intellectually involved in.
 
dandnsmith said:
I think that the use of interested in disinterested refers to interest as meaning have a share of, rather than being intellectually involved in.
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I was going to add something about the confusion between an interest and an investment to mean, essentially, the same thing as being a possible cause of this but thought I had detoured off topic far enough already :) If people stuck to investment, invested parties etc then there would be no need to overload the word interest. As for earning and paying interest it is not surprising English is the complicated mess it is.
 
Creep.

Andy Hurley said:
To my mind a person who does not have an interest (disinterested) is the same as a person who is not interested (uninterested) but clearly I am wrong (at least as far as tradition is concerned).
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Absolutely (ignoring the bits in parentheses)!

However, this would not be the be the only example of a word that shifted away from its original meaning and then shifted back again (to the annoyance of proscriptive grammarians).
 
Andy Hurley said:
I was going to add something about the confusion between an interest and an investment to mean, essentially, the same thing as being a possible cause of this but thought I had detoured off topic far enough already :) If people stuck to investment, invested parties etc then there would be no need to overload the word interest. As for earning and paying interest it is not surprising English is the complicated mess it is.
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I know, so many words meaning the same thing, so many words meaning many things. I was at school 20 years before you, and had this distinction drummed into me then. It looks like the battle is already lost. Many who should know better use disinterested wrongly. However, this is not the Hummy Arms, so I am not going to dwell on it here!
 
Andy Hurley said:
To my mind a person who does not have an interest (disinterested) is the same as a person who is not interested (uninterested) but clearly I am wrong (at least as far as tradition is concerned).
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The solution is to use uninterested and impartial and everything then makes sense. We don't really need disinterested do we? It is one of those words that has lost its meaning, like nice?

I can watch Formula 1 and be interested in it, even though I am disinterested about who wins a race. When it comes to football, I am both uninterested in it and disinterested about who wins.
 
Or gay.

I agree, there is no need of the word disinterested when there are unambiguous alternatives for whichever meaning is intended.
 
Nice really was a four letter word at my school, teachers saw it as a very lazy way to describe anything and everything, so it was banned.
 
That's teachers for you. As an exercise it is useful to find other ways to describe things, but everyday language is about practicality.

There was a spat about this kind of thing on R4 the other day, between Gwynne and somebody else.
 
Ezra Pound said:
Nice really was a four letter word at my school, teachers saw it as a very lazy way to describe anything and everything, so it was banned.
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We used to watch Delia Smith and count the number of times she said "nice" in one program! It was about twice a minute.
 
There is no need for the 'On' and 'Off' in your last post. The '[....' indicates on and the[/... indicates off. So the correct use of the code should be [Pedantic Mode] and [/Pedantic Mode] but I suppose that that's being pedantic.:frantic:
 
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