Making them up as I go (2)

1. Tell the truth.
2. Entice, or fail.
3. To emphasize, summarize.
4. If it ain't short, it don't work.
5. Be clear.


And so I don't forget:
Don't explain. Just tell a story.
Don't argue. Just say things that make sense.
Expect people to be bored by the writing, and shorten it.
Make the wording easy to take.

Remove Loose Ends -- the interesting one-liners that go nowhere.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Respectively???


Rochon and Rossi: Endogenous money: the evolutionary versus revolutionary views (PDF, 20 pages), page 3:

For this reason, within post-Keynesian literature we can identify two overall approaches to this question, which we label here the ‘evolutionary’ and ‘revolutionary’ views respectively.

Maybe I have this wrong, but my impression is that "respectively" is used to match up the elements of one set to the elements of a second set. Specifically, the word implies that the two sets are ordered in such a way that the ith element of the first set corresponds to the ith element of the second set, for all the elements in the first set.

Rochon and Rossi provide only one set:

{‘evolutionary’, ‘revolutionary’}


Therefore, the word "respectively" in their sentence is superfluous, incorrect, and frankly quite funny.

Way funnier than this post.

1 comment:

The Arthurian said...

From the OSHA Education Center, on Child Labor Laws:

"Minors are also not allowed to work before 7am or after 7pm respectively."