Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwanem 3568 days ago
You are allowed to criticize language usage. Others are allowed to point out that you do so in a rather silly fashion.

English, like almost any natural language, is rich in metaphor. If that's not your cup of tea, fine. But it's probably worth learning to roll with the punches, just the same. Is this really the hill you want to die on?
1 comments
talldan 3568 days ago
If I said "a handful of breweries" to you, how many would you take that to mean? Words like these can skew meaning greatly, and are inaccurate. I'm criticising because it wouldn't take much effort to indicate with more skill exactly what the state of things is. It's a careless use of words, in my opinion, which I don't expect from a writer of a factual news article. I'd be ok with it in casual usage.

It's also a shame that you and the other poster are focussing on this rather than the fact that the statement is plainly wrong. There are clearly more than a 'few' veggie-friendly brewers.

link
throwanem 3568 days ago
Perhaps your claim of fact is being ignored due to its highly dubious nature. That's a list of beers, not of brewers, and even on the first page we see multiple products from a single brewery in a few different cases. The list also appears to be somewhere between 126 and 150 items in length, unless they're making that annoying pagination mistake where you don't give any clue to the true length.

So what you've cited in support of your argument in fact militates pretty strongly against it, because a hundred or so breweries isn't a very large subset of all those in the UK - according to CAMRA, that's a total of 1424, which puts the fraction on your list somewhere around seven percent. That's a little strong for my taste, but still a good beer. It is also, one might dare say, a relative handful.

link
talldan 3568 days ago
It's why I said that it's not a full list. It's only 'approved' beers. There's loads that I could name off the top of my head not in that list.

This is a better list, which puts the number at closer to 50% if you use the filter 'England' and then toggle between Vegan and Everything: http://www.barnivore.com/beer?vfilter=All

link