Timeline for "Choices" vs. "options"
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 5, 2013 at 12:54 | comment | added | user24964 | Many grammar nits insist that you can only have two alternatives whether they've studied Latin or not. | |
| Apr 5, 2013 at 12:48 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @JohnM.Landsberg The dual thing is that alter is the other (something), so there can be only two possibilities, this one and the other/alter one. But you’ll hear people talk about having three alternatives to choose from, without being conscious that this bothers some people, or why. | |
| Apr 5, 2013 at 5:12 | comment | added | John M. Landsberg | @tchrist This is genuinely interesting, T. I studied Latin, but missed this class, I guess. Ergo, I think of alternative as essentially singular, basically a linearly oriented choice. "This is the alternative to that." And there can be many such choices, hence many individual alternatives. (And I think of the old joke: "How does it feel to get old?" "I much prefer it to the alternative.") So, can you expand on the duality? I'm interested. | |
| Apr 5, 2013 at 3:28 | answer | added | Canis Lupus | timeline score: 2 | |
| Apr 5, 2013 at 0:32 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @TheFrog Because only people who have studied Latin ever think of alter as being inherently dual, and because any expectation that people shall have studied Latin is itself a hopelessly obsolete notion, the whole thing becomes hopelessly obsolete. If you look at real-world uses of alternative, the overwhelming majority are multiple; hence how commonly several alternatives occurs. Only the verb alternate today retains any twofold sense to it in most people's minds. | |
| Apr 5, 2013 at 0:22 | comment | added | The Frog | @tchrist hopelessly obsolete? | |
| Apr 4, 2013 at 22:47 | history | edited | RegDwigнt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 5 characters in body; edited tags; edited title
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| Apr 4, 2013 at 21:01 | review | Close votes | |||
| Apr 4, 2013 at 22:47 | |||||
| Apr 4, 2013 at 20:45 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | The dictionary covers all this: a choice is not merely the act of selecting alone, but indeed can also be used to mean each one of the several available possibilities to choose from. Also, you seem to be confusing choice with the strictly dilemmatical (and hopelessly obsolete) sense of alternative. | |
| Apr 4, 2013 at 20:21 | review | First posts | |||
| Apr 4, 2013 at 21:00 | |||||
| Apr 4, 2013 at 20:03 | history | asked | Chris | CC BY-SA 3.0 |