The numbers would go down by half, which is meaningful, but also way less than you’d want it to. I can’t be arsed to pull up the NHTSA data url right now, but I use the factoid all the time when I talk to people about my riding: give or take 54% of motorcycle deaths are single vehicle accidents. Of those, the vast majority involve alcohol or speeding. So if I avoid alcohol I cut my chances by a large factor.
Speeding is slightly fuzzier, because the statistics are built from crash reports by police, and you can never know if they take the word of a witness that a motorcycle passed at a 4mph difference in speed, which, c’mon, is not the same as someone whizzing down a canyon road at 20mph or more over the limit.
My favorite “factoid” is that the -oid part originally means “resembling,” like a humanoid is something that only looks human, so technically a factoid would be something that only resembles fact. However, I’m not a dirty prescriptivist and I understood perfectly what you meant, so please carry on.
Presciptivism is where it’s at, broseidon! I use factoid for when something seems like a fact, but you can’t verify it right then. I know the internet often uses it for something quoted so much that people take it as fact even though it’s false.
Wikipedia just hates us all. I don’t want it to be a brief truth, waaah!
I hate the concept of “brief truth”. The Germans probably have a word for it. things can stop being true. Everything is a brief truth on a long enough timeline. By this definition “the moon exists” is a factoid because very briefly from now (on a cosmological timeline) that’s practically already false. Bah!
The numbers would go down by half, which is meaningful, but also way less than you’d want it to. I can’t be arsed to pull up the NHTSA data url right now, but I use the factoid all the time when I talk to people about my riding: give or take 54% of motorcycle deaths are single vehicle accidents. Of those, the vast majority involve alcohol or speeding. So if I avoid alcohol I cut my chances by a large factor.
Speeding is slightly fuzzier, because the statistics are built from crash reports by police, and you can never know if they take the word of a witness that a motorcycle passed at a 4mph difference in speed, which, c’mon, is not the same as someone whizzing down a canyon road at 20mph or more over the limit.
My favorite “factoid” is that the -oid part originally means “resembling,” like a humanoid is something that only looks human, so technically a factoid would be something that only resembles fact. However, I’m not a dirty prescriptivist and I understood perfectly what you meant, so please carry on.
Presciptivism is where it’s at, broseidon! I use factoid for when something seems like a fact, but you can’t verify it right then. I know the internet often uses it for something quoted so much that people take it as fact even though it’s false.
Wikipedia just hates us all. I don’t want it to be a brief truth, waaah!
I hate the concept of “brief truth”. The Germans probably have a word for it. things can stop being true. Everything is a brief truth on a long enough timeline. By this definition “the moon exists” is a factoid because very briefly from now (on a cosmological timeline) that’s practically already false. Bah!