Poe’s Law states that “without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake it for the genuine article.” The problem is that some Creationists really are so crazy that they can’t be parodied. I’m beginning to think that Poe’s Law needs to be adapted to apply to prescriptivism as well as Creationism; you would be hard-pressed to find a grammar claim so absurd that no grammarian would say it.
I mention this because of Gene Weingarten’s Chatological Humor, a chat on the Washington Post website. Weingarten is a humor writer for the Post, but he apparently feels strongly about grammar; his chat alternates between jokes and weird complaints about language usage. Given that the rest of chat is clearly intended to be humorous, it’s difficult to tell if he intends his grammatical advice to be humorous as well. The problem is that, as per Poe’s Law, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish honest insane complaints about grammar from facetious insane complaints. As a result, I’m slightly uncomfortable with deriding his grammatical beliefs. After all, there’s nothing that makes you look dumber than getting riled up about obvious satire.
Let’s go for it anyway. On the October 28 chat, Weingarten asks if there is something wrong with the sentence
(1) The drawing of the succubus was five times bigger than the drawing of the incubus.
Is there? Weingarten apparently thinks so:
“Something can’t be five times bigger than something else. It can be five times as big. “Bigger” allows only addition, nut [sic] multiplication as the modifying factor. “Five times bigger” is meaningless.”
This is insane on its face. First, math and grammar generally shouldn’t mix. That’s why Matt Lane (of Math Goes Pop!) and I no longer speak to each other. But seriously, what the devil is this even supposed to mean? I’m not even going to try to interpret the difference between addition and multiplication in bigger, because it’s so very obvious that this is completely wrong.
Five times bigger isn’t meaningless. I understand it, and I’m willing to bet that you do too. The only question is whether five times bigger means something that is 500 or 600% the size of the reference point. (From the examples I found from searching “exactly * times bigger” on Google, it looks like 500% is the standard interpretation.) But this uncertain interpretation just indicates that five times bigger is chock full of meanings, not meaningless.
And anyway, despite Weingarten’s assertion that five times bigger is impossible or meaningless, it’s been attested for centuries. Witness its use in The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (1699), The English Rogue (1671), or An Exposition of the Prophescie of Hosea (1641). Constructions don’t stick around for almost 500 years if they are meaningless. How utterly ignorant of your language do you have be to go around asserting such things?
Unless this is all a clever joke, in which case I have an awful lot of egg to get off my face.
Summary: X times bigger is a completely valid phrase, so long as X is a number/quantifier.
14 comments
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November 10, 2008 at 3:50 pm
John
He also says that “our destiny is not written for us, it’s written by us” is an illiteracy because destiny is predetermined and cannot be written. tha hell
November 10, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Gabe
Yeah, as if it would be a tremendous improvement to say “Our destiny is not pre-determined. In fact, we have no destiny. Rather, we have a future that we will write ourselves.” Sure, that might be more accurate or more complete, but it’s rhetorically crap. So many of the greatest quotes in this world are illiteracies, and I, for one, wouldn’t trade them for the world.
November 10, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Watch Yer Language - Your Monday reading list
[…] Gabe at Motivated Grammar takes aim at the perceived prohibition against such phrases as “five times bigger.” His target is […]
November 11, 2008 at 9:45 am
Jan Freeman
Another bit of evidence that there’s no real confusion: In my experience, if you want someone to interpret “five times bigger” as “600 percent” you have to explain it carefully and repeatedly. It’s not an “ambiguity” that arises naturally — it’s one that has to be tortured into existence.
November 12, 2008 at 7:53 am
The Ridger
“X times bigger is a completely valid phrase, so long as X is a number.” Surely you mean “so long as X is a quantifier”? Because “many times bigger” is totally okay. Otherwise, I’m with you.
November 12, 2008 at 10:14 am
Gabe
Jan: That’s a very reassuring point. Although it does point out that I no longer have intuitions about anything in English.
Ridger: Yes, you are quite right. I’ve changed it above.
November 13, 2008 at 6:51 am
Jennifer
What about “five times less” or “five times smaller”? I’ve seen “less” on a cell phone commercial (in an instance when it really should have been “fewer,” but that’s another rant altogether) and it bugs me. Is the intent to imply division rather than multiplication, and if so, why use the word “times”? Are we talking about multiplying by 1/5, or what?
November 13, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Jonathon
Jennifer: Yes, exactly. There’s no other handy word or phrase that fits that meaning without requiring you to restate the whole thing. Sure, you can say “One-fifth as much,” but that sounds a little stiff and formal. And just look at this nice symmetry:
“five more” = x + 5
“five less” = x – 5
“five times more” = 5x
“five times less” = x/5
November 14, 2008 at 10:52 am
matt
all this math in the comments is making me quite excited.
November 14, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Bill Brohaugh
Years ago when the world was less electronically mobile, one of our local TV stations debuted a news helicopter and began touting its ability to bring us live coverage from said machinery. Not to be outdone, another affiliate debuted two news helicopters, and announced that they were (actual slogan) “Twice as Live.”
November 17, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Gabe
Jennifer: Well, “less” could have been correct if the reduced object could be viewed as a mass noun. And I could see “X times less” sounding slightly odd, but surely no odder than other fixed phrases in English like “the bigger, the better”.
Jonathon: Symmetry, arithmetic symbols… man, this is getting to be a math blog. Which leads to the next comment:
matt: There’s nothing for you here. Go back to elliptic curves or votign systems or whatever your thing is these days.
Bill: I swear there was a news station in Pittsburgh that had some other equally stupid slogan when I was a kid. I remember being inconsolably irate about it. I suppose, looking back on it, that that was probably a seminal moment in my life, and probably a large part of why I’m the way I am now. Wow, free therapy!
December 18, 2008 at 1:01 pm
A friend
Are you sure that it is Greg? I thought that the Post’s humorist was named Gene.
December 18, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Gabe
I apologize profusely; it’s hard to keep straight those “G” first names. Had I a dollar for every time someone called me Gary, I’d be able to afford a martini at a swank club. I’ve changed it above.
December 21, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Having defended “five times bigger”, on to “six times lower”! « Motivated Grammar
[…] month, I argued that “five times bigger” is obviously grammatical. Unfortunately, James Kilpatrick […]