At Insty’s place, I saw this:
…and I was irritated by the non-clarity of the post.
There’s always an issue when using numerical values when writing. You can write “Ninety-nine out of a hundred people think that George Soros is an evil cunt” — which is acceptable — or “99 out of 100 people think that George Soros is an evil cunt” which is equally so. One can argue that the latter usage is more effective in that the scale is better described, and that is generally true when using large numbers, e.g.
“The chances of that cunt George Soros being hit by a meteorite while crossing Sunset Boulevard on any given Thursday are 1 in 174 trillion” works better than “one in one hundred and seventy-four trillion” (too many words, albeit expressing the same distressingly-small likelihood).
However, in the above Twatter post, the writer should not have used the numeral in his sign-off sentence, because there’s another “1” preceding it — referring to the other cunt, Nancy Pelosi — and the sentence as written causes a mental speed bump because in actual fact it is Pelosi (#1) who has changed her position / sold out on the tariff issue. (Trump (#4) has never changed his position on tariffs: he’s been arguing in their favor since about the 1990s, long before he became a politician.)
“Only one hasn’t sold out” would have been the proper way to write it.
