One To Fewer Than Three
Ripped from the headlines! Today’s paper has a small piece on a university study about the beneficial effects of moderate alcohol use. There’s an accompanying photo of a glass of beer, below which is the caption, and I quote:
Consuming one to fewer than three drinks a day can extend your life, a new study says.
I assumed that was surely a fuzzy-headed summary banged out by an overworked editor until I skimmed the article itself, which includes this line:
Moderate drinkers were defined as those who have one to fewer than three drinks daily.
Okay, yes, I’ve heard of fractions, but good captions make use of both brevity and accuracy. How about a show of hands for anyone who can tell us which number comes after one and before three?
Less than three drinks. OK, so I could have two drinks. Then I could have a half a drink. Then I could have a quarter drink, followed by an eighth, sixteenth, and so on. I could keep doing this forever and I would never reach three drinks! But I would be close enough, for inebriation purposes.
Bad Earl
Xeno’s Law! Yes. You can never actually finish that third drink if you siphon it down to molecule-sized droplets…
I love this! I am going to repeat this to folks I know, but will give you credit for your find as I do. Even if I am quite average in my own use of words, I have a passion for words and how people use them.