At Insty’s place, I saw this:
…and I was irritated by the non-clarity of the post.
There’s always an issue when using numerical values when writing. You can write “Ninety-nine out of a hundred people think that George Soros is an evil cunt” — which is acceptable — or “99 out of 100 people think that George Soros is an evil cunt” which is equally so. One can argue that the latter usage is more effective in that the scale is better described, and that is generally true when using large numbers, e.g.
“The chances of that cunt George Soros being hit by a meteorite while crossing Sunset Boulevard on any given Thursday are 1 in 174 trillion” works better than “one in one hundred and seventy-four trillion” (too many words, albeit expressing the same distressingly-small likelihood).
However, in the above Twatter post, the writer should not have used the numeral in his sign-off sentence, because there’s another “1” preceding it — referring to the other cunt, Nancy Pelosi — and the sentence as written causes a mental speed bump because in actual fact it is Pelosi (#1) who has changed her position / sold out on the tariff issue. (Trump (#4) has never changed his position on tariffs: he’s been arguing in their favor since about the 1990s, long before he became a politician.)
“Only one hasn’t sold out” would have been the proper way to write it.
Attention to detail is no longer a thing for most herd members.
I was taught, a long time ago, that for single digit numbers (zero through nine) one should write out the word, but that for double digit and higher (10 and up) one should use numerals.
The problem with the sentence–probably because of the nature of twitter–isn’t that he used 1 instead of one, but that it was poorly constructed:
“Only one of them hasn’t sold out”
Which still works if you use the numeral:
“Only 1 of them hasn’t sold out”.
“The problem with the sentence–probably because of the nature of twitter–isn’t that he used 1 instead of one, but that it was poorly constructed”
Good point.
The style guide I used for years (I forget which one now in my dotage) was clear on the matter. Whenever possible, spell out numbers one through nine, and use numerals for 10 and higher. The only exceptions to this I’ve ever used would be thus: “eight 10-car trains” vs “twenty 12-car trains, etc.”
That’s the difference between Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style and the AP Style Book. The former is a classic, the latter is much more inclined to be politically correct than grammatically correct.
I think “AP Style Book” is a contradiction in terms.
I suspect the AP Style Book nowadays is a takeoff from Alinsky’s “Rules For Radicals”