‘Always with the negative waves, Moriarty!’
I prefer “take away 7.”
I don’t know, I think “minus 7” is perfectly cromulent.
But what if it’s minus 40?
First, I must admit that I did not read the entire thread. I am somewhat surprised that I am responding to this.
There are very few things that people write that annoy me. The issue of “minus, or below zero” is not one of them. The author did communicate that the temperature is seven degrees below zero.
I do not understand the fuss. If this is all that annoys you, you have a good life.
I am with Johnny L.A. " ‘Always with the negative waves, Moriarty!’ ".
I will add, ‘Lighten up Francis.’
People stealing from me +/or shooting at me really annoys the heck out of me. Minor grammatical errors, or not, do not annoy me. As long as we communicated, all is well.
Convincing His Highness
it’s wrong to say “minus”
When the temp is way down in the red
Can have a quite a “negative”
Effect on the relative
Position of the neck to ones head.
That’s what known as Fucking Cold.
I don’t get the OP’s complaint at all.
Now, saying “negative 7 below” is going to raise an eyebrow. You mean 7 above, right? So just say that.
(This is also the second recent thread where “-0” is stated to refer to one’s complement binary. It also occurs in two’s complement.)
In all my many years on this planet and an enthusiastic weather-watcher, I have never, ever heard anyone use the term “negative” when discussing temperatures.
In two’s complement, 0 and -0 are represented by the same pattern of bits. In one’s complement they’re different.
When I learned math, the phrase “negative 7” would never have been used. Never. Then a few small-minded hobgoblins in math ed decided that the word “minus” was overloaded. It was used as both a binary operator and a unary operator. Although it never caused any conflict, they decided to change it and created locutions like “negative 7”. To my mind that is even worse since now “negative” is both a descriptor and a unary operator. But that gradually permeated the elementary and HS curriculum. But they never told us college professors (nor would have it taken if they had). So now the students come in to calculus courses and have to learn that when they hear “minus 7” that’s the same thing as the “negative 7” they learned in school. They do and it causes no confusion. Of course -7 = 0 - 7 and +7 = 0 + 7, so wherein lies the confusion.
From the OP, it is not clear what they are objecting to, but I say get over it.
Surely we can come to an agreement on this contentious issue.
It’s negative minus seven below zero.
That’s in F of course.
How about -7F (or -7C)?
I often omit the “°” when the context makes it clear that I’m talking about temperature, because it’s awkward to type, and doesn’t add further information. Similarly, in speech, it’s pretty common to say “minus 7 Fahrenheit” or “minus 7 Celsius”, omitting “degrees” when it would be redundant in context.
Newspaper style generally requires measured quantities to be given in numerals with (usually) no abbreviations for the units, and of course because it would be so easy to overlook in text, you would never use the symbol “-” for “minus.”
So … 7 percent … 100 miles … 15 kilometers … 85 pounds … 72 degrees Fahrenheit … minus-5 degrees Celsius … but 55 mph.
Also, the old rule was that no abbreviations should be used for currency (except U.S. currency for a U.S. newspaper, U.K. currency for a U.K. newspaper, etc.)
So
$2,000 (for U.S. newspapers)
2,000 U.S. dollars (for non-U.S. newspapers)
But
2,000 euros (not €2,000)
2,000 Canadian dollars (not C$2,000)
2,000 pounds sterling (not £2,000)
2,000 Japanese yen (not ¥2,000)
2,000 Chinese yuan (not RMB2,000)
I much preferred the non-abbreviated versions, but I see a lot of publications–even non-monetary-market ones–starting to use the abbreviations.
I’m annoyed that you used “less” rather than “fewer”.
<snork>
I can back this up, although I must have come into the process somewhat later than you did. When I was in school, from the first moment that negative numbers were introduced, we were told in no uncertain terms that the - sign was to be spoken aloud as “negative.” Reading it as “minus” was incorrect. Not just discouraged, but incorrect. You could read it as “minus” when it was serving as the subtraction operator. But if it marked a number less than zero, it was “negative” and nothing else.
I don’t recall any reason ever being given for this. It was just one of those “because I said so” things that teachers like to throw at you when they’re annoyed with your questions and want you to shut up.
The old rule followed from the difficulty of transmitting and representing without error the abbreviated versions. The new rule reflects the fact that almost every print publication and almost every interface can correctly and unambiguously use ¥, £, € without inviting transmission or representation errors.
I still read “=” as “takes the value” in computer code. Not because I ever has problem with FORTRAN, but because the pointy-headed academics who taught comp. sci. had a problem with overloaded symbols.
That may be the reasoning but I still believe that the abbreviated forms are inferior.
There’s no good reason to use the abbreviations—you don’t need to save space, and the written out forms are unambiguous and don’t require you to assume that the reader will understand them.
It’s the same with U.S. state names. I see no good reason to abbreviate state names in general audience publications.