Conversational multiplication

[MrsHathaway]

This has bugged me for years, possibly decades.

Jack has two toy cars. Alex has ten toy cars.

How do we express how many more cars Alex has than Jack, as a multiple, conversationally?

"Alex has five times as many toy cars as Jack."

OBVIOUSLY. [5J=A]

"Alex has five times more cars than Jack."

NO. Logically that translates to me as [J+5J=A]

Once more than Jack --> [J+J=2J]
Five times more than Jack --> [J+5J=6J]

I'm alone, aren't I?

Disclaimer: I did Semantics in my finals and often sometimes overthink.

I don't understand your question. You know your first example is the correct one, grammatically, which works out mathematically with your formula as well!

Then why do so many people say "five times more" when they mean "five times as many"?

I knew this was niche

This is the one for raising my blood pressure:

"Up to half price off"

I'm not good enough at grammar or maths to know the answer to your question or my own , but it makes me twitchy when I hear "John has five times less than Alex". Surely John has one fifth of Alex's haul, as one time less would be zero??

For me, [J+5J=A] is "Alex has five more cars than Jack". Which is different from "Alex has five times more cars than Jack." [5J=A]

You're not on your own OP. I completely agree with your whole post - and that of Kanye...

Oh bum. Didn't read the post properly.
Oh bum I didn't read the post properly in the pedants' corner!
I might agree with you OP.

Taxi and Kanye raise good points.

It's primary school arithmetic, ffs, and words of one syllable.

"Five times less? He has minus forty toy cars? Austerity has hit harder than I thought."

"5 items or less" at supermarket checkouts bugs me as well.

It's not "less", it's "fewer"!!!

Oh yes, and shampoo/cleaning products aren't "two times stronger", they're "twice as strong".

The problem is that you are insisting that "more" implies addition, not multiplication, though the counterfactual examples of "less" and "fewer" show that isn't necessarily the case. And given that "5 times more" includes "times", it's not unreasonable to think that we are talking about multiplication (ie multiplying the original number, not adding a multiple of it to it, as in J+5J).

You could say "Alex has five more cars than Jack", in which case it would be obvious that he has an additional 5, but if you say he has five times more, one reasonable interpretation is that the number of cars Alex has is five times bigger than the number of cars that Jack has. Or to put it another way, if Jack has five times fewer cars than Alex, wouldn't you expect Alex to have five times more than Jack? This, I think, is why people say it.

All of which goes to show that saying "X times more than" is probably best avoided.

Yes, prism, I agree about the internal logic, but it's still vastly annoying.

You would like "5 times more" to mean the same as "500% more", and I have a lot of sympathy with that.

Sympathy is exactly what I was after.Iam a reluctant (despairing) descriptivist.

I would say Alex is a pfb.