{"id":1240,"date":"2015-05-19T18:19:33","date_gmt":"2015-05-20T00:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bendreth.com\/?p=1240"},"modified":"2015-05-19T18:19:33","modified_gmt":"2015-05-20T00:19:33","slug":"bad-english-from-the-department-of-extra-superfluous-comparatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/?p=1240","title":{"rendered":"Bad English from the Department of Extra Superfluous Comparatives"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Driving home this evening, I heard a radio advertisement for an art exhibition this weekend. The advertisement promised &#8220;thousands of pieces of art from <em>more than a hundred forty plus<\/em> artists!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Pardon me for <a href=\"http:\/\/takimag.com\/article\/land_of_1000_microaggressions_jim_goad\/print\">micro-aggressing<\/a> with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2013\/11\/25\/ucla-grad-students-stage-sit-during-class-protest-what-they-see-racially-hostile\">my command of the English language<\/a>, but either the &#8220;more than&#8221; or the &#8220;plus&#8221; is redundant. &#8220;A hundred forty plus&#8221; is, by definition, more than 140. Therefore, the advertisement claimed that there would be <em>more than<\/em> more than 140 artists represented. Since &#8220;more than&#8221; does not imply an upper limit, you really can&#8217;t get more than &#8220;more than,&#8221; unless you&#8217;re going to get into infinities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Driving home this evening, I heard a radio advertisement for an art exhibition this weekend. The advertisement promised &#8220;thousands of pieces of art from more than a hundred forty plus [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1240"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1241,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions\/1241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}