"Three Times Less"

Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

I just saw a commercial on TV — I can’t remember what it was selling — in which they made the extravagant claim that something-or-other costs “three times less” than its previous price.

I know I was awake when we were taught multiplication in school. Here’s one thing I’m pretty clear on. Three times any positive number will be a positive number, probably three times larger than the starting number.

So I wish some gifted advertising person would explain to me how you multiply something by three, and wind up with a number that is less?

And I hear this on air all the time. Three times less. Four times less.

I get it with percentages. Thirty percent less — that means that if you start with one hundred, calculate thirty percent (I think that would be “thirty”), and then subtract that number, you know that the new number will be one hundred minus thirty, or seventy.

But ... is seventy perhaps “three times less” than one hundred? Or six times less? Seven times less? How many times less than one hundred is seventy?

Let’s look at it in the other direction. Starting with one hundred, what number would you multiply by to reach less than one hundred? I’m pretty sure that you would multiply by a fraction. One-half times one hundred is fifty.

And even in advertisements, it’s possible that most viewers would know that “The sale price is half of the original list price” means the same thing as “Price slashed by fifty percent.” Fractions can be represented by percentages, right? I think I remember that. We multiplied by percentages all the time.

Check my arithmetic on this. Selling something for three-quarters of its earlier price is the same as seventy-five percent. So you would multiply the list price — let’s say it’s $160 — by 0.75, and the result would be $120.

Do these advertisers have the research to prove that American television viewers are too dumb to know that “Price slashed by 25%” means “Now at three-quarters of the old price” or “Twenty-five percent less”?

To get to a number that is less, using multiplication, the multiplier needs to be less than one (1). Not three (3), because that is greater than one, and therefore the total should be “three times larger,” not “three times less.”

So I’m going to try a couple of hypotheses. First, maybe everybody involved with that commercial never got to multiplication in school. That was an elementary-school topic when I was a kid in the 1950s in Santa Clara, California. But who knows? Maybe after Covid, we have a bunch of high school grads who never got to multiplication by fractions or decimals or percentages.

Or maybe they had a commercial under construction advertising a price that was nine dollars less than the previous price, but at the last minute, they had to change their advertising copy because now the price was going to be twenty-seven dollars ($27.00) less.

“Well, Bob, that’s three times less than it was going to be!”

“We have to communicate that new information. How about saying, ‘Now three times less than the previous price”?

“Perfect! Nailed it!”

But no matter what hypothesis I think of, I still can’t figure out how “three times less” can have any actual meaning in the real world.

Maybe we’re just one step away from having this crapithmetic in the news. “Iran now has three times less drones than it had the week before.” And the editor corrects the reporter: “No, you mean three times fewer drones.”

To which, as a hater of junk grammar “rules,” I would pipe up with, “Oh, did saying ‘less’ instead of ‘fewer’ make it so the statement was unintelligible? He said three times less drones, but what did that mean? Are we depleting or increasing Iran’s drone supply, or painting all the drones green? What does ‘less’ mean in this context? Don’t stick to grammar rules that insist on a distinction without a difference!”

But no, I would not say that at all, even though the “less” vs. “fewer” distinction is obviously not essential, since we use “more” as the opposite of either without any failure of comprehension. I would say, “Excuse me, but what in hell does ‘three times less’ mean?” Because challenging stupidity takes precedence over nit-picking over obsolescent grammatical rules. Demanding meaningful content in a sentence is more important than making sure of the difference between aggregate and enumerated quantities.

True, saying, “Please give me fewer soup this time” makes you sound like an idiot, because there are genuine idiomatic distinctions. “Women are having less babies” also sounds a little dumb. Comprehension is possible, but something sounds off.

However, “Women are having three times fewer babies than in 2003” is a sentence without any meaning whatsoever, and a good editor will change that to a meaningful sentence like, “At a reproductive rate of 1.44 babies per woman of child-bearing age, we are currently well below the replacement level for the American population.”

But a part of me says, “three times fewer babies” will sound more impressive to people who aren’t really listening to or mentally processing the news. Maybe the writers of such sentences know their audience so well that arithmetical meaninglessness is not an obstacle to the level of communication they aspire to.