On the third day a Master Barnard brings me up a slate full of plusses,minusses,x,y,z’s, and other letters of the alphabet, in a most amiable algebraical confusion.
He valued Roderick’s friendship with the highest value he put on anything nowadays. Over the years they had assessed each other’s plusses andminusses and settled for the difference.
2015, Peter Wyeth, “[Commentaries] Reason”, inThe Matter of Vision: Affective Neurobiology & Cinema, New Barnet, Herts.: John Libbey Publishing Ltd; Bloomington, Ind.:Indiana University Press,→ISBN,page113:
As with LCR tout court the question is less to do with the plusses andminusses of the individual ideologies in themselves than in their relationship with their opposite numbers, in this case of Reason with Emotion.
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions atWiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
1808–10,William Hickey,Memoirs of a Georgian Rake, Folio Society 1995, p. 301:
The races being finished, we left Epsom for London, Mordaunt's natural vile temper not being at all improved by being three hundred poundsminus by the week's speculation[…].
1981 March, Kevin F[rancis] Collis,Cognitive Development, Mathematics Learning, Information Processing and a Refocusing, Madison, Wis.: Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Individualized Schooling,The University of Wisconsin-Madison,page 9:
For example, in solving the following equation, x + 4 = 9, the child using the negating mechanism will reason, "minussing 4" undoes "plussing 4" therefore, if x + 4 = 9 then x = 5 and will not see any point in using any intermediate steps.
1990, William T. Scott, “Systems and structures”, inThe Possibility of Communication (Approaches to Semiotics;87), Berlin; New York, N.Y.:Mouton de Gruyter,→ISBN,page38:
(The terms positive and negative feedback are now part of everyday language where the meanings are reversed: in cybernetic systems, positive feedback is undesirable for it indicates that the discrepancy is “plussing,” rather than “minussing” to zero.)
2011, Laura Christine Bofferding,Expanding the Numerical Central Conceptual Structure:
Four plus one is 5 and you go down because it'sminusing,[…]
2012, Jennifer S. Thom, “Opening Mathematical Spaces of Their Own”, inRe-Rooting the Learning Space: Minding Where Children’s Mathematics Grow (New Directions in Mathematics and Science Education;21), Rotterdam: Sense Publishers,→ISBN,page299:
“But you alsominussed! … Sam… Sam alsominussed seventy-two but he also… one hundred forty-four minus seventy-two equals seventy-two. He alsominussed the seventy-two.”
^“minus”, inCollinsCOBUILD English Language Dictionary, London:Collins,1987, published1992,→ISBN,page921, column 1: “The plural can be eitherminusses orminuses.”
“minus”, inCharlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879),A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
sin inEnrico Olivetti, editor (2003-2025),Dizionario Latino, Olivetti Media Communication
“minus”, inCharlton T. Lewis (1891),An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
"minus", in Charles du Fresne du Cange’sGlossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
