To the Editor:
The Hunterdon Democrat has provided me with many opportunities over the years to reflect on how fortunate I am to speak English, a language with an immeasurable richness that allows the expression of thought with the finest of nuance and the most exacting of precision. Consider, for the simplest of examples, the plethora of words at our disposal to convey a sense of the amounts of things. You can have a couple, a few, quite a few, several, myriad, multitude, horde, slew, loads or, in cases involving hospitality, a heapin’ helpin’, and while the list of words couldn’t possibly be infinite, or even number in the gazillions, you’ll have to admit that we certainly have oodles of number-related words that allow us to exquisitely communicate exactly what we mean.
My latest musing came unbidden when I gazed at the front page of the Nov. 15 Hunterdon Democrat, and my eyes fell upon the “Many defend Walton” headline for the Terry Wright article that then begins, “A half-dozen people showed up at the Freeholders meeting…”.
I just gotta ask, when in the world did the word “many,” used by Wright in the context of a Hunterdon County population of 128,000-plus, become a synonym for the number six?
Editor’s note: To be fair to reporter Terry Wright, he did not write the headline. It was written by an editor.