I was watching TV this morning before coming to work and saw a report that Reuters was reporting a building in Paris was partially leveled due to what they thought was a natural gas explosion. That was 5 hours ago and i have seen nothing on my web pages. I even looked at the Reuters web sight. Was this all a dream? Did anybody else see such a report?
Hallo – you can see an item about that on the BBC’s website
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2962452.stm
cheers,
Ms Boods
Yes, it was a gas leak. Almost twenty people are hurt.
Thanks for the information.
OK…gimme 20, who will say 20! anyone? OK. going once, going twice…it’19!
Do you normally find it funny that people are injured in an explosion?
I think *ltfire is expressing amusement at the phrase “almost twenty”, rather than the fact that people have been hurt.
‘Almost twenty’ is indeed a bizarre construction - ‘About twenty’ makes sense, because it implies that we don’t yet have a firm figure, ‘Almost two thousand’ or ‘More than two thousand’ also makes sense because it implies that we do have a firm figure that is around two thousand, but is inconvenient to spell out fully (‘one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-six’ is not really convenient for a newsreader).
But ‘Almost twenty’ implies (to me at least) that we know the precise figure (‘Eighteen’ or ‘Nineteen’ is actually easier to say), it is somewhat less than twenty, but that twenty makes better news.
BTW, I mean no offence Zazie.
oh well, my english isn’t perfect… I did see 17 or 19 whatever the number was at the time, and they were still expecting or looking for missing people, doesn’t 19 make “almost 20”??!
Oh well anyway it sucks.
I guess I would have preferred “almost one”.
Thank you for the backup,MANGETOUT.
The Trade Center tried to kill me. but failed. I find humor in a lot of things that I refuse to explain to anybody.