I agree that it's a bad usage, rather like "500% discount!" which I never see here in the U.S. That could be taken to mean that they give you money, and it's not that different from "five times less." Steve Gray Christoph Pacher wrote:
[...] Those books weighed maybe five times less, and contained way more than twice the algebra.
How do people feel about this construction, in which you use the phrase "five times less" to colloquially mean what a formal description would have to call "one fifth as much" or the like?
This came up on a blog I read, in which commenters seemed about equally divided between "This is just fine, it's completely obvious what the construction means" and "that's literally meaningless, no reasonable person should produce such a statement." At the time I wondered what the breakdown would be among a mathematician audience, and this seems like a chance to find out.
My vote is against "x times less", where x>1. I do not use it (but it is used by German speaking people as well).
Christoph
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