Of all the verses in the hymn, this verse is my least favorite, because of the egregious grammatical errors in the last two lines.
[ul]
[li]Since days can be counted discretely (as opposed to continuously), it should be “fewer days” rather than “less days”.[/li][li]The past tense of “begin” is “began”, not “begun”. Had the last line been changed to “…when we**'d** first begun”, there would be nothing to complain about: we’d still have the rhyme, and we would not have added any syllables.[/li][/ul]
Literature, rules as it may have, is not an exact science. Ever famous Shakespeare was quite fond of creating his own rules, and oft’ grammatical errors are simply a form of style. Another aspect to consider is that this poem is not meant simply to be read, but also to be felt. The meaning behind words become more important than the material words themselves.
It’s not the politicians doing it. AP and the like have been writing rosy headlines about the accelerating rate of the decrease in unemployment claims, or inflation etc. for decades.
wolf_meister, I think the reasoning goes like this. Let (*t*) be the number of dollars it takes to buy a loaf of bread at time *t*. The *rate of inflation* is the rate at which (t) changes as a function of time; i.e., the rate of inflation at time t is $’(t).
There is probably no confusion this far, but now the problem is that the OP dropped a preposition. I surmise that the quote was supposed to be:
“the rate of change [of] inflation is decreasing.”
Then it is reasonable to define the rate of change of inflation to be the rate at which the rate of inflation is changing, i.e., $’’(t).
Finally, to say that “the rate of change of inflation is decreasing” is to say that the function ''(*t*) is decreasing at time *t*, i.e., ‘’’(t) < 0.
Google suggests President Nixon said “the rate of increase of inflation is going down.” which is equivalent to the statement that “the third derivate of price is negative.” if I’ve counted correctly, though neither might be the best way of stating it.
What wolf_meister is saying is that when someone says, “X is decreasing”, they’re not invoking a derivative. You don’t have to understand calculus to understand a decreasing value.
What political speak. Sounds good, but it doesn’t even mean that prices are holding steady. In fact, that statement could’ve (probably) been made after the first week of the great depression.
Achernar, you also don’t need calculus to understand the rate of change of a value, so the sentence could be said to invoke no derivatives at all. The calculus only comes in when you want to make sense of an instantaneous rate of change. Likewise for an instantaneous decrease of a value.
It’s not pure mathematics, but it is undeniably technical: Gordon Brown, now the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, once famously mentioned post neo-classical endogenous growth theory in a major speech. (Judging by other threads, the cite’s coincidentally topical, but web references about speeches in 1994 are otherwise generally thin.)
