Re: Re: Warning As Children Shun Books In Favour Of Facebook

On 23/08/2011 21:00, mountainman0074 wrote:
> Before computers and social media, there was TV, radio, comic books and so forth.  And the remedy is the same - parental guidance.
>
> And, Joe,
>
> I think 'One in six children are...' is correct in the UK stylebooks. :)

:-)
Probably not, in fact. The reason is that the examples given in, for 
example, The Oxford Language Reference,  Gowers's Plain Words and 
Partridge's Usage and Abusage are different in construction.

Examples are like this the sentence: ' He is one of those people who are 
persistent.' What is persistent is 'people' - 'he' is merely one of 
those. Here we have something different. The object refers to the 'one', 
not the 'six'; the remaining five are defined by something else. Had it 
been 'three in ten', the problem would not arise, since both three and 
ten are plural without question.

It was also argued in the comments that this was a compound word [I 
think it is a phrase and not compound at all - one is member of the six, 
but not the same as them] or that it stands for a large number, since it 
implies proportion [However, written out fully, it would say 'one person 
in every six of the selected constituency'; thus it is an edited 
shortening describing a fraction - for comprehension purposes - and not 
a code representation of the raw number.].

But on the other point I agree, and would go further. I think reading is 
greater now than in the past.  And probably book reading too. That was 
my allusion about the lack of historic comparison. What might be 
missing, and has been missing for a very long time in the west, is 
shared stories in groups. The villagers round the fire, the community in 
the pub, the family in the evening.

Joseph


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