Rankine, my good fellow.
As long as you’re not using freaking Celsius, I don’t care if you say -7, minus 7 or 7 below.
It’s both C and F.
And by ‘C’ I mean cold, and by ‘F’ I mean fucking cold.
Could the OP, or anyone else, explain what the objection is to “minus 7 °F”? Is it that you want the word “minus” to be reserved for the binary operator of subtraction?
And while we’re at it, what does Mr Shine think is wrong with “negative 7”?
I’m annoyed by people mixing words, numbers, and abbreviations weirdly.
Good:
negative seven degrees Fahrenheit
minus seven degrees Fahrenheit
-7°F
-7°(F)
-7 degrees Fahrenheit
Bad:
negative 7 degrees F
negative 7°F
minus 7 degrees F
minus 7°F
-7 degrees F
-7F°
I don’t think any of those are good. Only “77 degrees F” is good.
(sorry, dealing with “Twenty-two under the zero mark degrees eff” here)
Might want to put the ° in the right place. IOW:
7° F, not 7 °F
At my house this morning my digital readout showed -0. I thought the entire field of mathematics had collapsed.
Dennis
Things like that happen in this weather.
Perfectly valid notation for the arithmetic inverse of 0. It just happens to be equal to 0.
I’ve read a lot of grammar and usage books written by all sorts of prescriptivists and I have never come across the idea that minus to indicate a negative number or temperature is to be avoided. Count me among those who wonder where the OP got the idea that there was something wrong with it. Minus as an adjective indicating a quantity less than zero is actually older, dating from 1579 according to the OED. The adjective negative in this sense dates from almost a century later, 1673.
Rankin/Bass.
Does the OP get annoyed when the Meteorologist tells you it is “68 degrees”? and not “positive 68 degrees”?
I see I’m not the only one who thought of that.
It’s probably a ones-complement thermometer. </nerd-joke>
To be fair, the meteorologist also doesn’t say “plus 68 degrees”
My dad has a doctorate in mathematics and was a university math professor for 30 years. He always insisted on “minus 7” and got annoyed when Walter Cronkite or someone like that said something like “negative 7.”
It’s better than minus (or times) as a verb.
How much is three minus two? - Acceptable
You minus two from three. - Ummm, “subtract” you fucking dolt!
Two times three is six. - Acceptable
You times it by three. - I’m amazed you can use complex things, like opposable thumbs.
This times 1000!
Why? What was his objection to “negative 7”?