At major auctions the first bids announced for a piece are typically fictional — numbers pulled from the air by the auctioneer to jump-start bidding.
It is these big choices about the UK's economic future – not fictional numbers made up for a cheap headline or to support the political agenda of one faction or another – that we should be focusing on as we approach the start of the Brexit process.
"We are blessing fictional numbers and believing our own lies," Black said.
The explanations of benefits that patients receive typically contain "fictional numbers that have no relation to the economics of what's going on," he said.
Recently, however, pro forma earnings have been used as a way for companies to divert attention from their actual GAAP earnings to a semi-fictional number management thinks will please Wall Street.
And though Powell would doubtless defend his bilateral talks with his fictional opposite number as just the actions of a fan, it underscores the sense of our leaders being small people who are happy with the mere facsimile of power.
All the ghostbusters have that quality of lovability that is most prominent when they are united in adversity, especially when up against the city's dodgy mayor, played by Andy Garcia, who has a very funny line about his fictional opposite number in Jaws.
Although the stories and characters were fictional, a number of elements had a real life background, taken from real people or events that Fleming knew or about which he had read.
(The KLondikes are so named here to reflect the way that, in movies and on TV, fictional phone numbers always begin with 555, or, in the old days, KLondike 5, to protect the innocent holders of actual phone numbers).
After years of therapy and treatment for her drug problem, she still lives in Rocinha and has written the semi-fictional book Number One about her love story with Naldo and her memories of that time.
After years of therapy and treatment for her drug problem, she still lives in Rocinha and has written the semi-fictional book Number One about her love story with Naldo and memories of that time, which has been published in Brazil.
