• The forum software that supports hummy.tv has been upgraded to XenForo 2.3!

    Please bear with us as we continue to tweak things, and feel free to post any questions, issues or suggestions in the upgrade thread.

Media mistakes

Every lazy reporter is now using the rather precise 404,000 number (it only includes cases, @gomezz), badly qualified with either "about", "around" or "approximately" (as @Black Hole first noticed). They are passing on a precision mistake from the source, plus another important omission they were probably too lazy to notice. Uni of Edinburgh's study actually said "may be as high as" (i.e. an upper limit, an obvious but apparently missed fact) when stating % figures for women and men that are both <1% (of the population, to 2 decimal places), and said (this is the original media mistake) that total is "approximately 404,000". Open Access Government have now taken that mistake one step further, claiming "over 400,000 people are affected", which is just misuse of stats given the upper limit is "approximately 404,000", which is itself +/- quite a lot (>6700 on the rounding, never mind the uncertainty [read the study] in how these were estimated). Rant over, I'm only commenting on the media & numbers, not in any way on the illness and those suffering from it.
 
Last edited:
Obs "Two Sergeants Major and their companies..." would be correct. My guess is that the under-qualified clerk entering this stuff got "Sergeant Majors" undersquiggled as an error but didn't know how to fix it and perhaps found the apostrophe got it past the spell-checker.

I presume all companies have a Sergeant Major and no companies have more than one, so to say "Two Sergeant Major's companies" could not work on any level, or at least be tautological.

Curious, isn't it, that these military compounds follow post-noun adjectives rather than (conventional English) pre-noun adjectives (eg 'court martial'}.

Prob this should have been in AvP, sorry.
 
My query is whether two Sergeants Major with individual companies could be referred to as "Two Sergeants Major's companies" and be logically equivalent to "Two Sergeants Major and their companies"? I would obviously use the latter.
 
Black Hole said:
All these are positions of importance rather than just a clerical worker.
Click to expand...
Typing "office clerk" into Indeed for London gives over 50 available jobs today, a few of the first listed are .................

Order Processing Clerk​

Accounts Payable Clerk​

Interim Purchase Ledger Clerk​

Happy now?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top