A recent Times leader, which declared that Something Must Be Done about the British drink problem, contained the following:
The problem is that while overall consumption is shrinking, fewer people are doing the drinking. The arithmetic means that those who are still filling their glasses, are drinking far more.
It took me three goes to make sense of that second sentence (which the Word grammar checker labelled as Fragment – consider revising!), to realise that in this example 'arithmetic' is the noun & 'means' the verb.
And I thought they were about to make a sophisticated point about the statistical distribution of alcohol consumption per caput, in which arithmetic would be the adjective & means the noun.
Related post
Cool it, Daddy-O!
Cool it, Daddy-O!
The title of this post comes, courtesy of the OED, from T. W. Chaundy et al. The Printing of Mathematics
The picture comes from Oxford Figures, Chapter 1: 800 years of mathematical traditions
