The death rate was more than 90 percent?
or
The death rate was over 90 percent?
Now, I know, in the interest of brevity many might be inclined to use "over" in place of "more than," but I would argue that's American laziness at its finest.
If we take some time to analyze the words, one can see my point.
"Over" defined by Merriam Webster means , "used as a function word to indicate motion or situation in a position higher than or above another
In short, "over" is most often used for spatial reasons, primarily to be above something, so it makes sense that it soon was used to mean "above" for abstract concepts.
"Over" is often used when dealing with numbers, particularly with percentages or groups of people. Recently, I saw the Sony website state, "It had over 9 million customers..." which is an acceptable use of the word, but I feel the word over ought to be restricted to spatial terms so as to avoid confusion.
The English language is already confusing and the multiple meanings of our varied words certainly don't make it any easier to understand. Prepositions in particular should be simple because they deal directly with the physical world. To get them mixed up with the abstract world seems reckless and asking for trouble.
For example consider the sentence, " I drove over you." Taken literally it means I drove my car over you, dear reader. I assure I would never do such a thing, unless you made me angry and said something as silly as "irregardless" but I digress.
The point is the use of over is unclear in this scenario because "over" deals with spatial concepts. Thus, "I drove over you," means I literally drove a vehicle over you, and probably killed you in the process.
I probably meant to say, "I drove more than you," which doesn't mean I committed vehicular manslaughter, but instead suggests I drove a farther distance than you. (Note: more on farther and further in the weeks to come.)
For this reason alone, I suggest we use "over" in its position as a preposition and stop trying to use it to represent abstract concepts. Bad things happen when you mix incompatible concepts such matter and anti-matter, peanut butter and beets, and Lana Del Rey and singing. Need I say more?
For sanity's sake, please be careful when using prepositions for abstract concepts.
Interesting take on this kind of problem...I think that prepositions are more important in English than in many other languages, in part because so many of our verb phrases are verb+preposition used as an adverb sort of...in other words, the verb phrases tend to be in a grammatical swamp, and therefore people end up (as an example) getting into semantic tangles in the text that comes afterward.
ReplyDeleteRestricting prepositions to spatial or temporal meanings may be a good rule of thumb, but I don't think we can apply it in every situation.
Perhaps in one of your future posts you could talk about the ear, that is, the fact that at a certain point we are talking about usage, not grammatical correctness, and meaning, not perfection...and often we can hear that something sounds wrong, even though our explanation may be a little forced.