Dan Asimov wrote:
This came up on a blog I read[...]
(Michael: This wasn't by any chance Mark Liberman's Language Log", < http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/ >, was it?)
The discussion started when Eugene Volokh mentioned "the violent crime rate in Canada is 10 times lower than in the United States" in a piece on Slate -- WARNING this statistic is unsupported, which was the point he was making, please do not quote it! -- and it was debated on The Volokh Conspiracy. http://www.slate.com/id/2143251/ http://www.volokh.com/posts/1150829292.shtml http://www.volokh.com/posts/1150922917.shtml That third link has an excerpt from Webster's Dictionary of English Usage which argues in support of "times less", even in formal writing, explicitly raising the claim that the construction may not make sense mathematically, but it does linguistically. --Michael Kleber -- It is very dark and after 2000. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a bleen.