What could have been.
It was a dream, but the nightmare started when I woke up and thought all day if “-20-plus” was really the correct word choice for the boring, imaginary non-Will Ferrell anchor to pick. “-20-plus” means that it’s at least -20 degrees or somewhat higher in degree, which doesn’t fit the context of what he was saying…which was more along the lines of “at least as cold as -20 degrees”.
I shot out a few emails to some certified “knowledge keepers”, who could provide valid input. My conclusion on the whole thing was that it is context-based. In the weather anchor situation, the “-20-plus” is technically ambiguous, but people (i.e., viewers and listeners) would probably understand what is being said. It’s contextualized enough to be meaningful the way it’s intended. The fact that it is spoken amongst a flurry of facts encourages the viewer not to dwell on the technical incorrectness of its usage.
This is what Hal (a non-homicidal* supercomputer** named Hal) said. He’s is a professor of IT at Penn State who may know a thing or two about the math angle:
If we let the internet speak, an interpretation of plus is “at least” which means “-20 plus” wouldn’t work. There doesn’t seem to be a similar interpretation for minus. The best bet would be “at most -20 degrees”.
That said, verbally I think you could get away with “-20 plus” based on you pauses/cadence/however you describe it. So, “minus (twenty plus)” would indicate the negative of some value at least as large as 20 as opposed to “(minus twenty) plus” which would be indicate a value at least -20.
Not necessarily related…I received a University email that included a deadline for an activity as “12:00 midnight Feb. 1”. As it turns out, this is ambiguous business.
Then I asked another professional acquaintance of mine, Stephanie, who was an English Lit major:
I would probably say “-20 degrees or below.” You have set the scale as weather related, so your listener should understand that you are setting -20 as the warmest/highest temperature with the possibility of going lower. Here “-20” is not a quantity (the way “400 plus people” would be) but a point on a scale, on which a higher number preceded by a negative indicator (such as -30) is actually a lower point.
Finally, here’s input from a linguistics professor:
Yes, it seems that it makes sense that “Plus” would work because you are adding, but you are adding “backwards”. To me it would be the same as if you said “-20 degrees or more” which is said by weathercasters all the time. Just my opinion, though. Not sure.
If there’s any takeaway from this, it’s that one shouldn’t have dreams that don’t involve Will Ferrell.
* I don’t actually know that he’s not homicidal. I’m just going by statistics.
** I don’t actually know that he’s not a supercomputer. His profession is rather computer-based, so there’s that.