Thursday, June 01, 2006
‘On Language’ 5/31 - These type of questions are tricky
These kinds of mistakes can make us all feel bad
‘On Language‘
Chicago Tribune
May 31, 2006
By Nathan Bierma
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Here are two short questions readers sent in by e-mail that I think deserve detailed answers.
Q. More often than not, talking heads on TV, especially football color announcers, say “these kind of plays.” Please make them stop.
—David Smith, Glencoe
A: You vastly overestimate my power over TV announcers. But it’s not just sportscasters who say “these type of things” or “these kind of things.”
A search at Google Scholar, which searches academic articles, turns up thousands of examples like this one from the International Society for Optical Engineering: “Two places where these type of data sets can be found are…”An article in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reads, “However, reliable quantitative data ... needed for these kind of studies are lacking.”
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