a better toilet

[Benjamin Barrett]

One million is probably a benchmark of some sort, perhaps a psychological one. In any case, I read this on the level of copy like "Save up to 40% or even more."

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

On Aug 14, 2012, at 11:14 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

> A piece on a Microsoft grant to reinvent the toilet at HuffPo includes a
> slideshow of past MS technological failures. It is in one of these
> slides that you find the sentence
>
>> The product, which may have been ahead of its time, was ultimately a
>> flop, failing to attract more than 1 million subscribers
>
> The clash here is between "failing" and "more than". Unless the product
> had sold exactly 1 million subscription, that's a failed comparison, at
> least on the principle of word economy. But I also happen to think it
> fails on the semantic level. The intended meaning appears to be that
> fewer than 1 million subscriptions had been sold. Why include "more than"?

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