Two wonderful/horrific manglings of logic and language that I spotted today.
The first is pretty simple. Just a classic case of a sportsman talking garbage. The second is a lot more worrying because it's been plastered on posters all over London, which suggests that somebody somewhere was meant to give it some thought.
Here they are...
1. From Mahendra Dhoni, captain of the Indian cricket team, when asked about whether the team should have turned up in Napier more than just 18 hours before their next match:
“Mentally we are right there. When it comes to the mind, it depends on what you’re feeding into the mind. The mind doesn’t know if it’s Napier or what you’re feeding. You come and say ‘this is Napier’, and it believes it’s Napier.”
2. And on those posters all over London:
"Nearly half of all journeys are walkable"
Altogether now: WHAT?!?
Which journeys are they counting? Surely there is an infinite number of possible journeys, an infinite number of which are infinitely long, even if you never leave London. So unless you can walk without end, saying that half of those journeys are walkable is either completely meaningless or just plain wrong.
Or do they mean actual journeys completed? In which case, how are they defining 'journey' and how are they defining 'walkable'?
It's not just rubbish, it's annoying rubbish. And I'm not quoting this poster out of context. In fact, I'll post it up here so you can see that there is no context:
2 comments:
Mentally we are all where we wish to be, be it i Napier or the pub, for is not all life an illusion? Simply that which we do between birth and death.
Even a plane trip is but another Step on the journey of life.
What a boring world we would have created if we all liked the same things. As unbelievable as it appears to me, I actually know people who actually enjoy cricket. Can anything be as bad as cricket?
I will admit that there are players with great skill but that still can't influence me enough to sit through a game.
Posters which are wrong just annoy me. There's one at college that says 'persons' on it when it should be people. At high school, somebody put up a poster with the wrong use of their on. I stuck a post it note on it explaining why it was wrong, and they all got taken down...
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