From Paul Schaffner
Feedback is campaigning against reducible fractions – for example, the Global Surveyor “zooming around Mars twice every two hours” (16 December 2006). This strikes me as just another vain attempt to rationalise English idiom – in this case an old one: “Of all the cases that I haue seene in this kind, I haue not knowne aboue three in three hundred, that haue beene iustly prosecuted in Court” (Mateo Alemán’s The Rogue, 1623, p 231).
Let Mister Rochester (Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, 1847, chapter 14) have the last word: “Not three in three thousand raw school-girl governesses would have answered me as you have just done.”
Ann Arbor, Michigan, US
