{"id":3247,"date":"2011-07-05T10:09:09","date_gmt":"2011-07-05T15:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3247"},"modified":"2011-07-05T10:22:27","modified_gmt":"2011-07-05T15:22:27","slug":"things-that-arent-what-they-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3247","title":{"rendered":"Things that aren't what they are"},"content":{"rendered":"

I'm used to arguments that this or that word is actually \"not<\/a> a word<\/a>\". But I was surprised to see an analogous complaint about numbers that are allegedly not numbers, in Nadia Damouni, \"Google bid 'pi' for Nortel patents and lost<\/a>\", Reuters 7\/1\/2011:<\/p>\n

At the auction for Nortel Networks' wireless patents this week, Google's bids were mystifying, such as $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128.<\/span><\/p>\n

Math whizzes might recognize these numbers as Brun's constant and Meissel-Mertens constant, but it puzzled many of the people involved in the auction, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation on Friday.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers,\" one of the sources said.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here \"not even numbers\" seems to mean something like \"numbers that have a whimsically over-precise number of significant digits, and therefore are so unexpected in this context that they don't seem to be real (in the \"not artificial or illusory\" sense, not the \"partition of the rational numbers\" sense).<\/p>\n

The quoted source continues:<\/p>\n

\"It became clear that they were bidding with the distance between the earth and the sun. One was the sum of a famous mathematical constant, and then when it got to $3 billion, they bid pi,\" the source said, adding the bid was $3.14159 billion.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Either they were supremely confident or they were bored.\"<\/span><\/p>\n

I was able to come up with these examples of \"Xs that are not even Xs\":<\/p>\n

Stop sending questions… that are not even questions.
\nPeople come here for gaming news, rumors, videos etc, and you repay everyone by doing a story that is not even a story – stuff like this is meant for blogs.
\nInstead of The Lion King or Beauty and The Beast, we get High School Musical and movies that are not even movies, just concert footage.
\nThe second pseudo type would be those men who are not even men at all. So in touch are they with their feminine side, their emotional selves, that they can predict all that a woman yearns for.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

No doubt readers can come up with some others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I'm used to arguments that this or that word is actually \"not a word\". But I was surprised to see an analogous complaint about numbers that are allegedly not numbers, in Nadia Damouni, \"Google bid 'pi' for Nortel patents and lost\", Reuters 7\/1\/2011: At the auction for Nortel Networks' wireless patents this week, Google's bids […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pragmatics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}