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The crack in Larsen C grew around 30 kilometres in length between 2011 and 2015. And as it grew, also became wider — by 2015, yawning some 200 meters in le
by Infernal 10y ago
The crack in Larsen C grew around 30 kilometres in length
between 2011 and 2015. And as it grew, also became wider — by
2015, yawning some 200 meters in length.
It feels pedantic, but honestly something so fundamental as confusing length and width makes this much more difficult to read at first glance than it should be.
- duskwuff 10y agoI don't see any confusion there. The "length" of the crack is its long dimension, from end to end, and the "width" is how far the two sides have spread away from each another.
- phkahler 10y ago>> I don't see any confusion there. "And as it grew, also became wider — by 2015, yawning some 200 meters in length." They use "wider" and "length" to describe the same 200 meter span.
- pasquinelli 10y agono, they use length to describe the measurement of the crack's width. totally valid afaic.
- abritinthebay 10y agoValid? Yes. Ugly to read? Also yes.
- arcticfox 10y agoYou can't just use "length" to describe a width. It's grammatically valid but semantically incorrect. An object can't be "100m long by 100m long".
- pasquinelli 10y agobut that's not how it's being used. what length of rope does it take to go around a quarter mile track? there's no ambiguity even though the track has length and width. the dimension in question was specified already, the width of the crack, so referring to the measure of that as its length is fine, no ambiguity.
- arcticfox 10y agoYour sentence is dramatically better than theirs because you're referring to the length dimension of the rope and the track. "What length of rope does it take to go around a quarter-mile wide track?" <- using the author's mistake in your sentence. There's not enough information in the sentence to answer correctly. The correct word for a measurement of wideness is width. Length [NOUN]: 1. the longest extent of anything as measured from end to end: the length of a river. 2. the measure of the greatest dimension of a plane or solid figure. It's pretty unambiguously wrong. You can back into what the author meant without ambiguity, but that doesn't mean the author used the correct word.
- sldivzklhc 10y agoThe statement is ambiguous, so it can still be valid. However the use of "length" twice in the same sentence to describe both the dimensions parallel and perpendicular to the crack is likely to confuse some readers. Some people's brains are not going to free the "length" pointer halfway through the sentence.
- Bud 10y agoNot pedantic. I noticed the same problem.