Dr Linda Moxey
speaker
29 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2012
last heard Dec 2012
Dr Linda Moxey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
These words perform other functions that have to do with inferences that you want to make on the basis of the number.
If you like, they're telling you the significance of that number as well as giving you a number.
And whereas the number that they tell you about is quite vague, the inferences that you make can be quite specific.
Although numbers can be very objective, they can be quite useless.
In a situation, for example, imagine I wanted to fly to London at the end of the week, and I don't know whether I want to
fly on Friday or Saturday but I want to make sure that I'm going to be able to fly and I phone up the travel agent and say how many seats are left on the last flight on Friday and the travel agent says 20.
That's actually quite useless to me that information unless I know how many seats are on the plane, what's the normal rate of sales because what you really want to know is am I going to be able to wait and still get a ticket.
So
In that situation it's more useful to be told that there's lots of seats or there's plenty or that there's hardly any.
There are lots of situations where you'd want to use a word and there's others where you would want to hear a number and really the usefulness of a number is determined by how much other quantity information you have already.
If you say there are occasionally accidents on this stretch of road, then that's a terrible thing.
You're saying that it's unfortunate because accidents happen.
If you use rarely, which conveys roughly the same frequency as occasionally...
And you say there are rarely accidents on this stretch of road.
You have to say that's a good thing.
It's a good thing that they're rare because you're actually emphasising the fact that accidents don't happen on this stretch of road.
These words perform other functions that have to do with inferences that you want to make on the basis of the number if you like they're telling you the significance of that number as well as giving you
a number.
And whereas the number that they tell you about is quite vague, the inferences that you make can be quite specific.
Although numbers can be very objective, they can be quite useless.
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