Can someone settle a grammatical argument?

[ravey]

You are categorically correct, the statement refers to either having blue eyes or not having blue eyes.

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[ravey]

Well technically correct is my favourite kind of correct.
Oh I'll be sure to gloat over this for as long as possible, it's these small victories that make life pleasurable

I know it's difficult to tell from my avatar picture but I have blue eyes which is how the argument started. I said that everyone would choose blue eyes if tell hey had a choice because it's obviously better. She said boll**ks because most people have blue eyes anyway so it's too common.

Green eyes > blue eyes.

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[ravey]

Leon, according to a NHS midwife friend of SWMBO's, (we call her 'Nursey'), it's exactly the opposite...Nursey says: when parents have blue and brown , the kids have brown. You only have blue eyed kids if both parents have blue eyes.....
.....just passing on Nursey's knowledge, dunno if she's right.....

A midwife should know that many babies have blue eyes until they've developed melanin. So in the UK most people have had blue eyes.

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[MyQul]

This thread is no 5 pages long in less than 24 hours. It's seems if there's one thing that HBers like almost as much as HB is Pedantry :lol:

 

[marlon]

A midwife should know that many babies have blue eyes until they've developed melanin. So in the UK most people have had blue eyes.

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Yeah...but that only lasts about 6 weeks...? Doesn't it?

 

[ravey]

Yeah...but that only lasts about 6 weeks...? Doesn't it?

Not sure what your point was

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[Chippy_Tea]

This thread is no 5 pages long in less than 24 hours. It's seems if there's one thing that HBers like almost as much as HB is Pedantry

Spot on MyQul and shouldn't that have read "This thread is now 5 pages long" :lol:

 

[Tau]

Green eyes > blue eyes.

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I agree green eyes better than brown or blue...lol Almost 6 page thread.

 

[Dutto]

I have to get my oar in here! :thumb: :thumb:

After a discussion like this one, I can assure everyone that most people in our house would have Black Eyes! :lol: :lol: :lol:

I have a sister and I hate sisters to be "right" but in this case ...

... her statement "Most people have blue eyes." is obviously supported by ...

... the statistic "50% of people in the UK have blue eyes".

Why?

Well if just 1% of people have, for instance, grey eyes then this means that 49% of people must have eyes that are coloured brown or green or any other colour but blue.

Therefore the statement "Most people in the UK have blue eyes." is a statistical fact ...

... assuming that the statistics themselves are correct! :whistle: :whistle:

 

[ravey]

[Trump]Wrong[/Trump]

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[IainM]

OK, I took this way too much to heart and spent much too much time looking up grammatical rules to clear this in my head. My gut instinct was that Steve was right, and now I'm not so sure. 'Most' as a determiner means 'the majority', but there are two ways of looking at it. Take this example, in the context of the last HBF brewing competition:

strange-steve submitted 2x500ml bottles.
everyone else submitted up to 2x330ml bottles, some of them submit 1x500ml bottle. Everyone who isn't strange-steve submitted, collectively, 20 bottles. The specifics don't matter, as long as each non-strange-steve individual submitted under 1L and the total amount submitted was much large than 1L.

Would the following sentence be true:
'In this competition, most beer was submitted by strange-steve'.

Interpretation 1: 'Most beer...' as a determiner is shorthand for 'most of the beer...', in which case the implicit preposition specifies a relationship with the whole amount of beer submitted, and the above sentence is false because most of the beer was not submitted by strange-steve.
Interpretation 2: '... compared to everyone else'. Here, the omitted participle implies that there is a series of comparisons between strange-steve and every other individual, that every participant can be compared on a number line, and that strange-steve submitted more than everyone else, and the above statement is true.

Thus, due to the ambiguities of the English language, Steve is either right or wrong depending on the interpretation. Nobody is right and nobody is wrong.

 

[ravey]

If it was that he submitted "the most" that would be true, but it would also be a different statement. There's really nothing ambiguous.

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[ravey]

Also you're not making a straight comparison, blue or not blue is completely different to 1 bottle, 2 bottles, 3 bottles, 4 bottles, etc.

 

[strange-steve]

Another way to look at it...
You asked a group of 100 people to each write down a random number, they all chose a unique number except for two people who both choose number 7. Would you say "most people chose the number 7"?
No you wouldn't... same thing with the eye colour.

 

[ravey]

That's because 51 of them chose 8

Doh, you said unique except. I'll get my coat.

 

[Tau]

I had to force the midwife to change eye colour to hazel green as I said this will affect stat's, she was so slack, her name was alice lol

 

[pvt_ak]

I had to force the midwife to change eye couler to hazel green as I said this will affect stat's, so was so slack, her name alice lol

Is ' couler ' some sort of privately purchased colour influencing liquid ?


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[Tau]

Is ' couler ' some sort of privately purchased colour influencing liquid ?


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Have corrected, but on 3rd bottle of wine :mrgreen: Couler Sounds very French a bit like Danny Dyer and the french in his family that turned out to be William the conquerors family..lol:lol:

 

[pvt_ak]

Have corrected, but on 3rd bottle of wine :mrgreen: Couler Sounds very French a bit like Danny Dyer and the french in his family that turned out to be William the conquerors family..lol:lol:

3rd [emoji15] good effort ! [emoji23] DD[emoji3] this thread is amusing [emoji851]


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[ravey]

OK, I took this way too much to heart and spent much too much time looking up grammatical rules to clear this in my head. My gut instinct was that Steve was right, and now I'm not so sure. 'Most' as a determiner means 'the majority', but there are two ways of looking at it. Take this example, in the context of the last HBF brewing competition:

strange-steve submitted 2x500ml bottles.
everyone else submitted up to 2x330ml bottles, some of them submit 1x500ml bottle. Everyone who isn't strange-steve submitted, collectively, 20 bottles. The specifics don't matter, as long as each non-strange-steve individual submitted under 1L and the total amount submitted was much large than 1L.

Would the following sentence be true:
'In this competition, most beer was submitted by strange-steve'.

Interpretation 1: 'Most beer...' as a determiner is shorthand for 'most of the beer...', in which case the implicit preposition specifies a relationship with the whole amount of beer submitted, and the above sentence is false because most of the beer was not submitted by strange-steve.
Interpretation 2: '... compared to everyone else'. Here, the omitted participle implies that there is a series of comparisons between strange-steve and every other individual, that every participant can be compared on a number line, and that strange-steve submitted more than everyone else, and the above statement is true.

Thus, due to the ambiguities of the English language, Steve is either right or wrong depending on the interpretation. Nobody is right and nobody is wrong.

Grr, trying to watch the grand tour and getting distracted by this thread.

Sorry, I'm guilty of getting to point 2 and stopping reading after '....compared to anyone else'.

Having looked again my initial thought was that it wasn't stated so there's no implication. By saying most beer is missing "of the" you're creating a fake premise whereby you can add an alternative view where ".... compared to anyone else" is missing but somehow implied.

That's just wrong, and in trying to think how I'd explain it as wrong I'm thinking "Whilst you could say 'most of the beer', just saying 'most beer' is perfectly acceptable on its own too; there's nothing missing from that which allows you to just add an extra condition".

Hmm is that right? Would you say 'most beer'? But that's the thing, this isn't a fair comparison; it was "most people have blue eyes", are you going to say that this is shorthand for "most of the people have blue eyes"? It seems to me that trying to come up with analogies only confuses what was already very simple.

If I can be facetious (and when am I ever not):

I'm the best darts in the world.

I missed out 'at', and that's a false statement. I also missed out 'apart from people who are better than me', so it's alternatively true!


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