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Comment by johnr2 | Hacker News Reader

"both at perception, dexterity and mind work"

Off-by-one error ;-)

Isn't this correct in English? The equivalent on my first language (Portuguese) is very clearly wrong, but I've seen the English version in more than one book.

"Equally" would be a better instead of "both" if they are, indeed, weighed equally, or just skip "both" altogether and maybe add an "as well as" before the last item on the list: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22357/equivalent...

> Isn't this correct in English?

I, as a non-native English speaker, would write

"thrice at perception, dexterity and mind work"

(instead of "both at perception, dexterity and mind work"), but I am not sure whether this is overly formal (it is, in my experience, often the case that when you try to translate how you would express something in German into English, you land at something overly formal, since in German the commonly used language register is more formal than in English).

An American native speaker would certainly understand and not raise an eyebrow at using “both” in this context, even though technically it means two not three.

Using “thrice” is sort of archaic and formal (like you mentioned) and people would maybe make a good natured joke about being “fancy” if you used the word “thrice” often in conversation.

Oddly though twice has none of the baggage of thrice, and is used all the time. My four year old knows and uses twice, but doesn’t know what thrice means.

Thrice doesn’t really fit the sentiment of the sentence there. It would be best to replace “both” with nothing in that sentence when moving from two to three items.

“Both” itself isn’t necessary when dealing with two items (not that it hurts, IMO). It could serve a rhetorical purpose if you particularly wanted to emphasize the equal relationship between the two items. E.g., if one item might normally be perceived as significantly more important than the other, “both” is a way to address the surprise or skepticism the reader may feel seeing them placed together equally.

It's definitely not technically correct. "Both" in English unambiguously refers to two things.

One dictionary says "two or more" and even cites a Samuel Taylor Coleridge example with three things:

From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/both :

> both conjunction —used as a function word to indicate and stress the inclusion of each of two or more things specified by coordinated words, phrases, or clauses prized both for its beauty and for its utility he … who loveth well both man and bird and beast — S. T. Coleridge

"Both" refers to two. If you're referring to the the lack of a serial comma, it isn't "incorrect" in American English but should be, and most style guides recommend using the serial comma.

I interpret this as using the binary operation "both" in a reduction over a list of three items. Kind of like how you can add a list of numbers through e.g. (PLUS 1 2 3 4) in LISP, although addition is actually a binary operation.

It's definitely wrong. But it is blasphemous to even believe that there can be right or wrong in such matters.

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