The Unholy Grammarian Strikes Again

[elfs]

In recent months I have started to detect a case of innumeracy in news writing that really bugs me. I spotted it today in an article about Lactobacillus anticaries, a bacteria in yogurt that delays tooth decay onset by modifying the behavior of streptococcus mutans, the bacteria that causes tooth decay. The article read, "Using L. anticaries... the bacteria in the mouth that causes tooth decay is reduced as much as fifty times."

Now, I'm going to assume that what Reuters does not mean is that the bacterial count was reduced by a factor of 1125899906842624:1 (that number in the high range is 2⁵⁰). Instead, I suppose that the Reuters editor meant to say that the bacterial count was reduced to one fiftieth of what is normally found in the human mouth.

I don't believe that American innumeracy is helped in any way by the editors of Reuters being so grammatically liberal. The more educated members of its audience (like me) will look at that and wonder with frustration at what our news people are coming to. As Brad DeLong is fond of saying, Why or Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corp?

Comments

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

Ummm, this particular educated member of your audience wonders what the hell you're talking about. :-) I've never seen 'times' used as a sort of binary version of 'order of magnitude' before; if it were 'halved fifty times' you'd have an argument, but 'reduced fifty times' has a fairly clear meaning, albeit one that could be brought out more explicitly with the implied phrase 'compared to an untreated mouth'. Dictionary.com also seems to support the common-sense usage; this is from meaning 6(b) of 'time':

times Used to indicate the number of instances by which something is multiplied or divided: This tree is three times taller than that one. My library is many times smaller than hers.

[bldrnrpdx.livejournal.com]

You know, math illiteracy affects 7 out of 5 people.

[bolindbergh]

Forget numeracy, what happened to subject-verb agreement ("bacteria" is plural, dogblammit!)?