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Oddities
Going With the Flow
By Evan Jenkins
Questions and observations from readers produced a collection whose existence can seem to give logic a bad name.
• Isn’t “a friend of mine” a double possessive?* Yes, but idiom loves it and would just hate the alternative, “a friend of me.” “A friend of Bob” and “a friend of Bob’s,” though, are both fine.
• Isn’t it wrong to say “six times more likely,” which might be taken to mean something is X plus 6X? Don’t we have to say “six times as likely”? No. The two are equally well established. Both mean 6X.
• If human beings constitute a species, and a race is a subdivision of a species, how can we talk about the “human race”? Well, writers since Shakespeare, at least, have used the phrase, it is uttered millions of times each day, and there’s no going back. (Anyway, “race” at its simplest just means creatures of common origin, which makes it unusually - maddeningly? - flexible.)
None of us who care about the language are immune to twin weaknesses: we hunger for clear-cut rules, and we have a pathological aversion to ambiguity. Sometimes it’s best to relax and take what the language gives us.
Within reason, of course.
* See also Double Possessive
Addendum, 2/14/05
In the matter of “six times more”:
When a son with a keen eye and ear for the language (and a math degree) insisted that such phrasing indeed meant 6X plus X, or 7X, to him and to many people he worked with, further research seemed in order. (He later came across supporting evidence in the form of guidelines from a reputable academic organization, though a rather specialized one; those folks “put the ‘eek’ in ‘geek,’ “ he said.)
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage derides the 7x view, while acknowledging a certain logic in it. Those who espouse it, the editors declare, are “paying homage to mathematics at the expense of language.” And there’s more, all sensible.
But the estimable New York Times Manual of Style and Usage says “precise readers” might well be 7Xers. Its editors therefore urge the use of “times as much (or as fast, etc.).”
Well — a smart kinsman, some solid geeks and an industry standard on usage (differing from another) — not to mention the newspaper editor who raised the question with Language Corner in the first place — all saying “6 times more than X” means “7X.”
Most readers, including an awful lot of precise ones, clearly don’t see the world that way. But the hardy few aren’t nit-picking cranks, and their numbers are more than infinitesimal, and they can’t be ignored. “Six times more” is pretty much unusable.
A sad state of affairs? Perhaps. But “six times as much as X” — and just “six times X” — are idiomatic, unambiguous, a reasonable compromise, and a safer bet.
CJR
