are more in the category of "Strunk and White is a shit guide."

I can't betray my first love.

I did once have a big old crush on Strunk and White, but that was because it was the first conversational guide I'd ever read. Now I'm good with picking and choosing whose advice I take, but then I was just so fucking glad someone was telling *people* how to compose English correctly.

Not, of course, realising, that only nerds and people forced to were reading it. Oh, oops, the choir and the resentful.

According to the OED, nauseous entered written English as "feeling ill," but that meaning was later considered obsolete, replaced by nauseated for feeling ill.

But wait! Wouldn't the true pedant's perspective be to deplore that first shift, and welcome the popular effort to reclaim the original meeting? Drive back the forces of 18th century popular misuse?

It has taken me over a week to figure out how to download something I bought because the link to download on the "order status" page is not underlined. I thought we had an understanding, internet.

Hivemind math advice requested: someone on another website is claiming that "studies show" that a woman who's been on oral contraceptives for 3 years increases her cancer risk by 1000%. Which is pretty obviously nonsense--I remember just enough of How To Lie With Statistics to feel pretty confident in calling it nonsense, but I'm kind of a numbers moron myself and can't figure out how to quantify the idiocy.

Can anyone who's mathier than me take a crack at it? I know the ACS current lifetime risk estimate for the average USian woman is 1 in 8; and the Guttmacher Institute says that the US has approximately 43 million reproductive age, sexually active women, of whom about 10.7 million are on the Pill, most for at least 3 years over their lifetimes, if not a whole lot longer. I'm pretty sure all those numbers add up to "1000% is a completely crack-addled junk stat you just pulled out of your ass," but I'm not sure why, and I'm getting a math-anxiety stomachache just thinking about it. Help a sister out, anyone?

Um, of WHAT cancer? Any cancer? Cause being on the pill reduces your risk of several cancers, so that seems...unlikely. I mean, even if it was "increases 100%" (which would be doubling your risk).

I think a 100% increase would mean twice the risk and extrapolating would mean that the risk would be 10 in 8. My guess is that this figure comes from a very narrow and carefully cherry-picked metric.

I think a 100% increase would mean twice the risk and extrapolating would mean that the risk would be 10 in 8. My guess is that this figure comes from a very narrow and carefully cherry-picked metric.

Okay, yeah, that was my first thought. It's just that my second thought was that there's no such thing as ten out of eight women, so clearly I'd done something wrong.

Did I mention the math anxiety? Even when I stumble on the right answer, I immediately proceed to talk myself out of it.

I'm horrific at political debates because I want to make sure my numbers are accurate and I don't want to dismiss other claims out-of-hand. This means I have trouble with anyone who pulls figures out of their ass or is basing their info on BS information.

I don't think you can extrapolate from the numbers JZ gave, because those are numbers for all women...which means that women who do or don't take the pill are included in it. And it depends on how LONG you take the pill also.

See the below link--decreases ovarian and endometrial risk, may increase breast cancer risk but after 10 years off (which is MOST women, since most women aren't diagnosed until they're old) it's the same, and increases liver cancer for white women but not others. May increase cervical, but really mostly that risk is about HPV.

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