The local announcer for my NPR station always claims that our area "has" 26 degrees or "had" 44 degrees yesterday, or "will have" 53 degrees tomorrow. This leaves me with two things I don't understand:
1) How can I possess degrees Fahrenheit?
2) Why does this always nag at me?
On the first, I know I can't and don't actually possess those degrees. My town won't "have" 44 degrees today. I experience them, or I note that the temperature in the air corresponds to that amount on a measurement scale. But I do not now have, nor have I ever had, any number of degrees Fahrenheit (named of course after Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit, 1686-1736, German physicist). Same goes for Celsius (named of course after Anders Celsius, 1701-44, Swedish astronomer). And of course Kelvin (William Thomson, 1st Baron, Lord Kelvin, 1824-1907, English physicist and mathematician). He's right out.
On the second, I mean, can't I get over this? What's my problem? Who really cares if I have them or if the air *is* a certain number of degrees? Yet it's a daily torment. It even led me to spend four and half minutes typing this post. Four and half minutes I no longer "have."
In any event, I'm sorry I wasted your time. Carry on.
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I've never heard that kind of grammatical construction used before, but perhaps the announcer was originally a native French speaker, and doesn't realize that the idiomatic usage in English is different? (On the other hand, I don't really remember any of the French I learned in college, so perhaps I'm mistaken about that. Or maybe it's just some weird Virginia dialect feature.)
Or here's another thought (and now you've got me wasting my time thinking about this, damn you!): This could be an instance of elided or truncated speech, as in, "yesterday we had [a high temperature of] 50 degrees" or "currently we have 40 degrees [showing on the thermometer]". The announcer is simply using the communication channel more efficiently by dropping some redundant information.
As for the answer to your second question, I'm not sure, but evidently it is contagious.
That one never bothered me, the one I find most annoying is getting power units all wrong. We almost always hear 100million watts/year. Now any physicist knows a watt is power (energy/time). Power/time would be a change in the rate of power. So it would be correct to say that China is building generation capacity at a rate of X GWatts/year, but completely incorrect to say a dam generates Y Gwatts/year. I never know if the problem is (1) basic lack of understanding of high school physics, or (2) they really meant X Kilowatt-hours/year, but wanted to shorten the sentence.
Oh, she's a native Virginian, but I've never heard anyone else claim to "have" degrees. And it happens too often, with enough air time to not be worried about speaking efficiently, to believe it's just shorthand. Noble attempt to save her though, Kurt. She's indebted to you.
And bigTom, if I had to guess (which is all I'm left with), I'd vote for a combo -- that they probably used shorthand, as X watts/year, but did it so quickly that they skipped past their high school physics and therefore didn't see that saying so was incorrect. Not that, umm, I could be accused of ever having done anything of the sort.