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by kragen
1911 days ago
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Well, if something runs only at night and on windy days, that means it runs at night, regardless of whether there is wind, and that it runs on windy days—which might mean "24-hour periods that have a lot of wind", thus also including the night, or "non-night periods that have a lot of wind", due to the semantic ambiguity of the English word "day". In this case, though, the ambiguity doesn't matter; it comes to the same thing. But the meaning is different from your intended meaning. A different way of stating the meaning of "only at night and on windy days" is "always, except in the daytime when it isn't windy". But of course the daytime when it isn't windy is precisely when it's actually possible to run solar-powered trains without batteries, at least if you run overhead powerlines or a third rail down the whole train track. What you meant was "trains run at night only on windy days", which could also be validly phrased (at the cost of some ambiguity) as "trains only run at night on windy days". But the extra "and" that you inserted in the middle of the phrase made it impossible to read the phrase as having your intended meaning. Perhaps you hadn't noticed the extra "and" when I quoted it in my earlier comment above, accounting for your confusion. Or perhaps you just don't speak English very well. Which is okay! I'm a second-language speaker too, and it's hard at times! But it's not a valid reason to accuse people of willfully misinterpreting you. |
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It's absolutely a valid reason to accuse you of willful misinterpretation, especially when you bring this up more than a month later in an unrelated topic. Your reply was downvoted with good reason.