LOL, my county is awesome. Election decided by rolling a 20-sided dice.
Or a 20-sided die, anyway.
I believe the OED now considers ‘dice’ the modern singular.
Who gets to choose the die?
https://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/That’s_How_I_Roll_-_A_Scientific_Analysis_of_Dice
The OED can go die.
Good call.
Historically, dice is the plural of die, but in modern standard English dice is both the singular and the plural: throw the dice could mean a reference to either one or more than one dice
So, I hereby retract my earlier retraction.
Ugh. I don’t like that change.
I see what you did there :)
I want off this planet already.
So the new rule is that if enough people get it wrong, it becomes the new right?
This is the planet of Stupid.
After doing a little more reading it turns out the die/dice split is mostly an Americanism…not something we should be overly proud of at the moment. BrE and their ex-colonies seems to favor “dice” for either singular or plural.
And then also, specifically using “die” has just always sounded a bit fussy and a little prissy, so I rarely use it.
That’s the really cool thing about languages - they’re living, evolving things. If enough people get it wrong, it becomes right. Literally.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/08/politics/poll-of-the-week-trumps-favorite-pollster/
To the surprise of virtually no one, Rasmussen had the worst polling record of 16 different pollsters for the midterms.
Overall, pollsters did fine:
Looking at all pollsters, the average poll hit the mark nearly perfectly. The average gold standard poll (i.e. ones that use live interviews, calls cell phones and is transparent about its practices) over the final three weeks of the campaign had Democrats ahead by 9.4 points on the generic congressional ballot. That’s an error of less than a point. The average pollster overall, according to the FiveThirtyEight aggregate, had Democrats up by 8.7 points. Once all the votes are counted, that could have hit the nail on the head.
But Rasmussen not so much:
The average Rasmussen poll had Democrats ahead by 1.7 points on the generic ballot. That’s an underestimation of their eventual position of nearly 7 points. This made Rasmussen’s average poll more inaccurate than any other pollster. …
Rasmussen’s final poll was the least accurate of any of the 32 polls. They had the Republicans ahead nationally by one point. Democrats are currently winning the national House vote by 8.6 points. That’s an error of nearly 10 points.
Yup. Painful to watch it happen, but that’s how it goes…
English is basically a collection of German grammar and spelling errors.
With a massive infusion of French vocab courtesy ol’ Willie the Conqueror!
I’m okay with this as long as we start saying “dices” for plural. Who’s with me?
-Tom
Well, that’s the way it works for mice/meeces, so I’m in!
Ah so the singular of dice should be douse.