[tlhIngan Hol] ordering and scope of adverbials relative to timestamps

[Will Martin]

I have been misunderstood. 

I do not mean to imply that you have to say a number which is exactly accurate. I mean that you need to say a number.

You need to state a number that gives one a sense of scope and scale of what you are measuring. We have lots of examples among the canon of just this sort of thing.

Do we really mean exactly 1,000 throats can be cut in one night by a running man? Of course not. But we are not going to say, “Nearly 1,000 throats...” or “About 1,000 throats,” or “A little over 1,000 throats.” We are going to say, “1,000 throats”.

And we are going to say “A year ago” or “11 months ago”. We are not going to say, “Almost a year ago”.

We don’t care if the measurement we give isn’t exactly accurate. We do care that we are not vague about what that number might be. We are decisive. We grab a number that is close enough and we use it. We don’t use vague, wittering, indecisive terms to almost describe the time period.

And I don’t care what Worf says when he is speaking English. This is irrelevant.

Sent from my iPad

> On Feb 8, 2019, at 10:58 PM, Daniel Dadap <daniel at dadap.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Feb 8, 2019, at 19:56, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
>> 
>> Worf says "A Klingon may be inaccurate, but he is never approximate."
> 
> It is possible, then, that this statement may be inaccurate.
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