I don’t mean to be a pedant but…
6:02 pm on the 13th of May, 2007No time for proper blogging so this will have to do:
I don’t mean to be a pedant but, he does mean less than lethal doesn’t he?
Tags: bbc-news, pedant, taserACC Ian Dickinson, of Lothian and Borders Police, said: “The use of the Taser, which is one of a number of less lethal weapons available to police, is intended as a specific alternative to the use of firearms. It can only be used in the most violent and dangerous situations.
Source: BBC News | Taser gun used to quell pub row
May 17th, 2007 at 8:01 pm on the 17th of May, 2007
No. He means ‘less lethal’ as in ‘less lethal than a gun’. Tasers are not ‘less than lethal’ because they have a very real risk of causing death or permanent injury (and have done so many times in the US). It wasn’t a mistake, ‘less lethal’ has its own meaning.
May 17th, 2007 at 8:11 pm on the 17th of May, 2007
I’m not convinced, though I’ll conceed that ‘less than lethal’ maybe isn’t right either. Potentially lethal would be better.
Lethal means to cause death, or being enough to cause death. You are only ever dead or not dead - there’s no halfway house. So you can’t have something that is less lethal than something else. If it kills it is lethal, if it doesn’t kill then it is not lethal.
In the case of a taser it may kill or it may not, this means it is potentially lethal. It might impart a lethal shock, but that shock is no less lethal than a bullet might have been.
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