3 million all over again
Last night I caught part of CNN’s special 300 Million: Melting Pot or Meltdown, on the booming population of our fair nation. You can look at summary and review of the show, since I can’t seem to find anything about the program on CNN other than this blog entry.
While the content is of course noteworthy, what got my attention was something that the host, Anderson Cooper, said near the beginning of the broadcast. From the transcript:
Right now, we are less than 12 hours away from a milestone with enormous implications. At 7:46 a.m., Eastern Time in the United States, the U.S. population is expected to hit 300 million. 300 million. We have reached this milestone faster than ever before. It took the nation 139 years to get to 100 million mark in 1915. And another 52 years to reach 200 million in 1967. But it will have taken just 39 years to hit the 300 million mark, which means that the country is getting bigger and much bigger much faster.
Note the part that I made bold. We’ve got a comparison being made by the word faster. The item being compared is the (speed) of reaching the milestone of 3300 million people. And the standard of comparison: well, it’s ever before. Now, when you put just before, you can omit the material that might describe what actually happened before. Compare this to Nowadays, threats spread further and faster than ever before. What happened before was “threats spread (far/fast to some degree)”. What’s important in making this sentence work is (i) that we’re talking about generic threats, so there doesn’t necessarily have to be some particular threat that spread both before and now, and (ii), there actually could be such a threat, since threats can spread continuously. A slightly different example would be His apartment is bigger than before. Here there’s not a generic assignment, but a role. That is, there are several incarnations of the role apartment in “his” life (e.g., the one on Broadway, the one on Market, the one back East), and the current incarnation is bigger than the previous role-fillers were. (On another reading, the same physical apartment was made bigger, by annexing neighbouring rooms, for instance).
But to return to Anderson’s sentence, we’ve got a problem. We can’t interpret what we have done before is “reach this milestone,” because (i) there is no generic “this milestone” (since it really means “3300 million,” which is a particular value), (ii) there is no role “this milestone”. (Similarly, you can’t say this apartment is bigger than before to mean that it’s bigger than previous incarnations of the apartment role). Nonetheless, what he said is clear enough, especially if you listen to the next few bits. Basically, we’ve gone from milestone-to-milestone faster than ever before, and this particular time, we got to the 3300-million milestone. And, though this may be obvious, you have to make sure that you are comparing equivalent milestone-distances; you can’t, say, look at how long it took to get from 150 to 250 million, and compare it to the time it took to get from 250 to 300 million.
Now, I’m not sure what principle might tell you that you allowed to say something like that. I mean, you can describe it as a sort of “coercion” from entity to role, induced by the before. It would be sort of (barely) similar to the coercion involved in a sentence like I believed her in five minutes, where the believe is coerced into being an event with an endpoint, rather than a state.
[edit: In an extended brain-o, somehow most quantities were divided by 100 in my head when I wrote this. This has been fixed, with reminders to my brain to be more attentive next time.]
But surely the milestone is “a million (more) people” - from 0 to 1 million, from 1 to 2 million, from 2 to 3 million?
Hmm, I hadn’t considered that to be the meaning of “milestone” (rather, I thought it meant something like “having 3 million people”; in restrospect, that’s probably not quite correct). But, the particular issue is with the phrase “this milestone.” If we say that “a million (more) people” is the meaning of “this milestone”, then we might expect to be able to say things like “We’ve reached this milestone only twice before,” or “When we next reach this milestone, the year will be 2030.” Those sould really odd to me. If you changed it to “this type of milestone” or “a similar milestone,” it would sound much better (okay, it would sound stilted, but it would make more sense).
It might be clearer if a slightly different use of “milestone” is considered. For instance, “Race relations reached a new milestone with Kimberly Jones’ speech.” You couldn’t follow up with “This milestone was reached again when Pat Smith gave an equally moving speech three years later,” even if the “distance” between the milestones is conceived as equivalent.
He could have meant “We have reached this type of milestone faster than ever before.” It would still be vague, but it would leave open the idea (surely what he must have meant) that the rate of population increase is increasing. Can’t we just say that sometimes people are merely incorrect, especially when they say something where the structure isn’t broadly repeated? Only a lay person talking here.
Yes, people are absolutely sometimes just incorrect. But the ways in which people can say incorrect things probably exhibits certain patterns, which can be interesting per se. And there’s still the question of how we can “correctly” interpret incorrect sentences.
Am I missing something? Why all this talk of 3 million when the milestone is 300 million (and the increment discussed is not 1 million but 100 million)?
Would you believe a “divide by 100″ rule in California English (I guess it would then be a “divide by 1″ rule)? Honestly, I have no idea, but I fixed the bits in the body of the entry.
What I wondered when I heard the reports: The newspapers kept saying “300 million Americans,” so were they excluding the much-reported 11-million-or-so illegal aliens? On the one hand, they kept saying “Americans,” so I’d say yes, but on the other hand, I didn’t hear a single report that said anything like, “And if we add in the 11-million-or-so illegal aliens and [X] legal aliens/noncitizens, that brings the current US population to some 311 million + X people!”
Yeah, that was in the back of my mind as well. But apparently the census was taking into account both documented as well as undocumented immigration, according to this yahoo article. The CNN special seemed to avoid the phrase “300 million Americans,” though it did have other mentions of “X million Americans” for the populations during previous significant world events.