Hacker News Reader

Comment by pasquinelli | Hacker News Reader

no, they use length to describe the measurement of the crack's width. totally valid afaic.

The statement is ambiguous, so it can still be valid. However the use of "length" twice in the same sentence to describe both the dimensions parallel and perpendicular to the crack is likely to confuse some readers. Some people's brains are not going to free the "length" pointer halfway through the sentence.

You can't just use "length" to describe a width. It's grammatically valid but semantically incorrect. An object can't be "100m long by 100m long".

but that's not how it's being used. what length of rope does it take to go around a quarter mile track? there's no ambiguity even though the track has length and width. the dimension in question was specified already, the width of the crack, so referring to the measure of that as its length is fine, no ambiguity.

Your sentence is dramatically better than theirs because you're referring to the length dimension of the rope and the track. "What length of rope does it take to go around a quarter-mile wide track?" <- using the author's mistake in your sentence. There's not enough information in the sentence to answer correctly.

The correct word for a measurement of wideness is width.

Length [NOUN]: 1. the longest extent of anything as measured from end to end: the length of a river. 2. the measure of the greatest dimension of a plane or solid figure.

It's pretty unambiguously wrong. You can back into what the author meant without ambiguity, but that doesn't mean the author used the correct word.

Valid? Yes. Ugly to read? Also yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com