On Wed, 23 May 2012 14:20:03 +0000, Bill Fairchild wrote: >And the general public, many Dilbertian managers, and even some of us >professional nitpickers, think that a job running 1 hour instead of 10 is 900% >faster, > I believe that's correct usage, even as an airplane that flies from New York to Washington in one hour is 900% faster than a car that makes the trip in 10 hours.
>and that 1 is 10 times smaller than 10. > And that's confusing or nonsensical. But see: e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness#Marked_and_unmarked_word_pairs http://www.springerlink.com/content/u15776721t318p8u/ Does "24/7" sometimes presume an exception for national holidays? Why is it "24/7" rather than "24x7"? And why do markets display prices such as "3/$1.00" rather than "$1.00/3"? Is chartreuse about 50% greener than olive? Now, can we get back to our charter of discussing the appropriate use of TLAs? -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN