A number of
Topic/tag: Language, short
When I write, I regularly find myself using the idiom a number
of
. The idiom appears in my musings, or at least my draft musings.
For example, I might write, there are a number of reasons that I muse
.
The idiom appears in my scholarly papers. For example, I might write,
a number of students raised concerns about pair programming
.
But it’s not an idiom I should use [1].
A number of
does not provide a very clear count. One is a number.
Fifty-two billion, ninety-eight thousand, six hundred and three is also
a number. So is negative five. And pi. A number of
provides really
little information about which I mean.
At times, I even add an adjective, as in a surprising number of
Democratic candidates add me to their email lists
[2]. Does that make
it any better? No; it’s equally bad. Zero might be surprising, given
my political views. Ten billion would also be surprising because there
aren’t that many Democratic candidates.
I should probably use some
or a few
or many
or about a dozen
,,
depending on the situation. I try to catch myself; I don’t always manage
to do so. When I don’t, I should try harder. That way, I can reduce
the number of situations in which I use number of
[3].
Postscript: I suppose I could see what
others mean when they use the idiom. At one
place,
Merriam Webster tells me that it means more than two but fewer than
many : several
. But in
another, I discovered
that one of the definitions of number
is as follows:
- an indefinite usually large total. A number of members were absent. The number of elderly is rising.
Unusually large
strikes me as more than many. And what does it mean if
I write An unusually large number of members were absent
? Is that doubly
unusually large? Or is it just redundant?
Postscript: What unit of speech is a
number of
? I turned once again to Merriam
Webster,
but all it told me was that it’s an idiom.
Of course, the examples suggest that I shouldn’t trust Merriam Webster.
In one example, they treat number of
as an adjective; if a number of
members were absent
, members
is clearly the subject. However, if
a number of elderly is rising
, number
seems to be the subject.
In the former case, a number of
seems to be serving as an adjective
for members
. In the latter case, of elderly
appears to be modifying
number
.
That makes it even harder to figure out what part of speech we’re dealing with.
Let’s consider the case in which a number of
serves as an adjective.
It seems strange to just call it an adjective
since I tend to think of
an adjective as a single word. Would adjectival phrase
be correct? I’d
think so, but Wikipedia
says that an [adjectival phrase] is a phrase whose head word is an
adjective
. Is number
an adjective? I traditionally consider number
a noun. I guess it could be an adjective, as in the number five
.
But it’s clearly serving as a noun in number of
. And Merriam Webster
says it’s just a noun, even in the cases in which it seems to be using
a number of
as an adjective.
I shouldn’t trust the InterWeb. Maybe I’ll ask one of our friendly linguists.
Followup: One linguist says that in a number of x
, the of x
modifies
number
. He also notes that if I insisted that a number of x
modifies
x
, I could call it a determiner
, like some
or all
.
[1] Editing question: I originally wrote: But it’s an idiom I should
not use.
I changed it to But it’s not an idiom I should use.
Which
is better? And why?
[2] I wrote that sentence while musing about how hard it is to reach inbox zero. I’m pretty sure I ended up eliding it.
[3] And yes, the two uses in that sentence are okay. At the beginning
of the sentence, it doesn’t matter how many there are; the focus is
on reduction. At the end of the sentence, I’m using the idiom itself
as the object of use
, which makes the particular number irrelevant.
Version 1.0 released 2018-07-04.
Version 1.1 of 2018-07-05.