Perhaps I’m misinterpreting the usage of the word ‘corollary’ or there are other definitions I’m unaware of but in the following the use of corollary seems to be used to mean ‘equivalent’. Is this a proper usage?
5 minutes 42 seconds into the clip
"Trump has overseen almost five times as many lethal drone strikes in his first seven months in office as Obama did during a six month corollary."
definition of corollary
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/corollary
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/corollary
No - this person possibly meant ‘…as Obama did during a six month correlated period.’ Meaning they wanted to match up the first six months in office so that the pressures of a President initially in office, their quality of not having long-established policies and relationships to their national security team, and other factors would be similar. However, they’ve substituted the wrong word for what they actually meant. They really should keep the time consistent.
I’ll take “New words accidentally mis-coined by Newscaster” for $400, Alex.
‘Corollary’ and ‘Correlate’ are completely different words. ‘Correlated’ (or ‘Correlatee’ —thing which is correlated—if it were a word) might serve newscaster’s meaning.
I thing the phrase should have been something like …
" as Obama did during the corresponding period of his first term"
The choice of two slightly different periods gives the impression that somebody has cherry picked data for effect.
As framed, the response would be correct if there was a policy/requirement that Trump would use drone 5 times more than Obama did, and even then you could argue that the increase was the corollary of the policy, not the number of drone strikes during Obama’s first 6 months.
You seem less interested in OP’s question than in whether some newscaster is using bad stats to treat Trump unfairly. Moreover your “would be correct if there was a policy/requirement that Trump would use drone 5 times more than Obama did” appears to have no basis whatsoever.
Why don’t you Google and find out what the lethal drone rate was during different periods over the past ten years?
I disagree - i think Mr/Ms Thule’s suggested wording - ‘corresponding’ - is as neat as your suggestion of correlating, and relates directly to the OP’s point. Both are apt, while corollary is misapplied.
Thule’s second point was, if I understand right, attempting to explain what the newsreader would have needed to mean in order that corollary was used correctly. Unsurprisingly, it would have been a garbled point, not made any clearer by the choice of word.
FWIW my interest in the OP was the language, but no matter. That you can’t distinguish a question on linguistics from ideology doesn’t surprise.
There is no correlation between these two periods of time, or any other. They aren’t correlated, they are sequential, they are independent. To say that the periods of time are a corollary as in the OP’s quote is flawed, a case of “Post hoc ergo propter hoc”.
It is a correlation with the US election schedule that these periods are the first 6 months of two presidencies. I’d be of the opinion that it was no coincidence that there were many more lethal drone strikes at the beginning of the Trump presidency than at Obama’s.
If the statement was “There were 5 times as many lethal drone attacks in the first 6 months of Trump presidency as in the corresponding period in Obama’s”, that sounds like a balanced and alarming comparison. To qualify this comparison you could pose the question;
“Were there 5 times the number of drone strikes launched under Trump?”
Alternatively “Were the same number of drone launched but they were 5 times as lethal?”
In this case they are deliberately chosen not equal periods, which materially weakens any comparison or correlating factor. It begs the question what happened in the 7th month? Did Obama get his warmongering mojo going?
All these are questions of the lexicology or semantics if you prefer.
As the googling to determine the facts, do your own homework.
The two time periods chosen do have a mutual relationship & connection according to the first definition - they are periods chosen from the beginning of Obama’s presidency and the beginning of Trump’s presidency, both depending on the recency of election.
However, if you were to say that the two time periods are not correlated in the technical statistical definition of correlation, you are correct.
You’re also correct that the time periods chosen are poorly chosen, and even if that was done for innocent reasons, it still appears deceptive - that’s poor practice regardless of whose names are in the example.
And use of ‘corollary’ is just wrong in this case.