Has "N times less" become commonplace? [duplicate]

I've heard more and more people saying "A is N times less than B" in many contexts. I even saw in a news journal (forgot whether it was Time or Newsweek), "The object was 3 times closer than the moon".

I cannot bring my self to say this. It just seems wrong. If "2 times closer" or "5 times slower" mans "half as fast" or "a fifth as fast", then why not just say that? Besides to me it seems logically that "A is 5 times less than B" ought to mean "A = B - 5*A".

I also speak French, and the French say this all the time (in French and in English).

QUESTION. Has this horrible formulation become common place, and we just need to accept it and start using it? Or is it still regarded as ambiguous and should be avoided in scientific writing?

(this question is related to Meaning of “x is 35 times less than y" but it different because it asks a different question.)

Solution 1:

To attempt to answer the question about frequency, rather than the meaning, I checked on Google ngrams for

times fewer than,times less than

And, because "times few than" was down in the noise, I checked that by itself

It looks like the usage of both has been pretty variable in the past. "Times fewer than" is rare but has had a bit of a renaissance in the last few decades. But it was more popular in the past.

There is thing called the "recency illusion" where people think that forms of language they dislike are being used more by "people today". (I seem to remember reading about a cuneiform book of grammar with an introduction saying that the author had written it because "people today no longer know how to use our language properly").

p.s. the meaning of "N times less than" is not intuitive to me, so I would never use it.

Solution 2:

First, "A is 5 times less than B" does not mean "A = B - 5*A". That is never what a native speaker would think. "Times" is always multiplicative, so the amount of "less" is 5 times greater. "Less" can have a subtractive meaning, but it's much less common than being used as just a word of comparison (like "more"). As such, the multiplicative "times" is a much stronger meaning, and so when used together, "less" is never subtractive.

For example, "A is 10% less than B" means you should subtract 10% of B. If you say, "A is 10 times less than B," it means A is one tenth B. The "times" takes priority. Though for general comparisons, such as "A is less expensive than B", it also is just a simple comparison, not subtractive (and these are more common).

In English, saying something like "A is one fifth as fast as B" is more awkward than saying "A is five times slower than B." They are both correct, and both might be used for the same situation. Thinking in whole numbers is faster and more convenient, however, and is good for emphasizing the size of the difference.

So no, this is not a horrible formation. This is a very usual and easily understood part of English. In science, it's more common to use "A has one fifth the speed of B" for maximum clarity, but what is best-practice in science, and what is proper English are not the same. (Best-practices are always more restrictive than what is correct in the language as a whole.)