Board Thread:False Info and Speculative Discussion/@comment-207.254.224.12-20140717193212/@comment-4091815-20140720022336

HolyDrumstickofLove wrote: You can be as confident as you'd like. It doesn't mean you are using the word correctly. In fact, if you studied the root words, you wouldn't even need to know the definition to know you aren't using it correctly.

Also, those who work at the Centers for Disease Control got it wrong. It is ok that they got it wrong, because they are biologists, not English majors....but as a journalist, I expect more from you. fascinating that you know so much more than most of the rest of the world -

The education industry - "...you see student progress along a continuum versus As, Bs, Cs and Ds."

Law Enforcement - "These policies describe a escalating series of actions an officer may take to resolve a situation. This "continuum of force" generally has many levels..."

Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Works - "...the behavior of high school wrestlers fell along a gender continuum between an orthodox masculinity and femininity."

And one that seems particularly on point - Industrial Design - "Critical controls, especially for emergency operation, are often laid out for application of large force or torque. For normal operation, the Human Factors engineer selects an "optimal" value within the continuum of strength of the prospective user populations."

The World Health Organization also uses the phrase when discussing the continuum of health but you've already decided that large bureaucracies whose job it is to communicate with large numbers of people don't understand words so....