Five times less

[Joel S. Berson]

I have trouble with "two times more than mine",
but then again I'm a fussy mathematician.  If my
salary is 100, then two times more is
300.  (Count an additional 100 twice.) "Two times as much" is 200.

I also have great difficulty with "two times
less"; I have to say "one-half as much"

At least they don't say "two times fewer"!

Joel

At 5/22/2009 03:28 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>I don't have a problem with the fact that, before I retired, my salary
>was _two times less_ than that of my wife, as opposed to "my wife's
>salary was _two times more_  than mine," but I agree with everyone
>else, otherwise.
>
>A value 200% less than nothing? <har! har!>
>
>-Wilson
>­­­
>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>-----
>-Mark Twain
>
>
>
>
>
>On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the
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> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> > Subject:      Re: Five times less
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > On May 22, 2009, at 6:32 AM, Bill Palmer wrote:
> >
> >> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> >> -----------------------
> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> Poster:       Bill Palmer <w_a_palmer at BELLSOUTH.NET>
> >> Subject:      Five times lwss
> >>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> In a letter to the editor of the Raleigh News & Observer today, a
> >> writer
> >> complains that her salary is "five times less" than that of the city
> >> manager.  So how does one perform that calculation?
> >>
> >> Is this more arithmetic than language?
> >
> > we had some considerable discussion of the matter here back in the
> > fall of 2007 (which i can't at the moment examine, because the server
> > seems to be unavailable).  but there's some discussion here:
> >
> > AZ, 8/9/08: Recency:
> >  http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=463
> >
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> >
>
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