English questions

[Travis B.]

Would you use the word "blog" to describe an individual blog post? I've seen people who do that, but I've also seen people who always use "blog post" or simply "post" instead. What's your personal preference?

I would prefer "blog post" - "post" is more general, and also encompasses forum posts, Facebook posts, etc.

[Man in Space]

Would you use the word "blog" to describe an individual blog post? I've seen people who do that, but I've also seen people who always use "blog post" or simply "post" instead. What's your personal preference?

I’m inclined to say “post”, though I’d accept “See my blog about $whatever” in reference to a specific post (though again my inclination is to just say “post”).

[Linguoboy]

How do you interpret the expression "divide by half"?

What prompted this is a post that says "Divide 500 by half and add 90. What's the answer?" For several respondents, the answer is ambiguously 1090. For others, it's tentatively 340. I'm in the latter category. I have a conflict here between "half", which I use in informal real-world contexts (like cutting up or folding objects) and "one half", which is what I would expect in formal mathematical contexts.

[Travis B.]

How do you interpret the expression "divide by half"?

What prompted this is a post that says "Divide 500 by half and add 90. What's the answer?" For several respondents, the answer is ambiguously 1090. For others, it's tentatively 340. I'm in the latter category. I have a conflict here between "half", which I use in informal real-world contexts (like cutting up or folding objects) and "one half", which is what I would expect in formal mathematical contexts.

In informal contexts I would interpret "divide by half" to mean divide in half. In formal contexts I would interpret it as that the person was being unclear and using the informal meaning, and ask them to confirm that they meant divide in half, particularly since if they meant to double something they would probably use "double" or "multiply by two".

[Estav]

How do you interpret the expression "divide by half"?

What prompted this is a post that says "Divide 500 by half and add 90. What's the answer?" For several respondents, the answer is ambiguously 1090. For others, it's tentatively 340. I'm in the latter category. I have a conflict here between "half", which I use in informal real-world contexts (like cutting up or folding objects) and "one half", which is what I would expect in formal mathematical contexts.

It depends on the context. If I knew the sentence was produced by someone trying to communicate straightforwardly, I would guess that it was meant to express "divide 500 by two", but I don't believe I would put the idea this way even in an informal context: to me, the wording just seems "sloppy"/"incorrect" (and not in an idiomatic, established way that I am familiar with; e.g. it isn't comparable to "Could care less"). The natural collocations with "divide" and "half" for me would be things like "divide in half" or "divide in(to) halves" (the latter mainly with physical things, not numbers).

The sense "Divide 500 by 0.5" seems to be the literal meaning to me. It is an odd way to describe the operation, but if the sentence is meant to be a puzzle, that doesn't necessarily decrease the likelihood of this interpretation being correct, so I would go with 1090 as my "answer" if we assume that the question is intentionally worded strangely because it was intended as a kind of "test" by someone trying to produce a question that the reader has to think through to answer correctly.

For me, I would say that the literal meaning as written isn't really ambiguous, but the intention of the author is ambiguous because it's unclear whether it was accidentally worded to mean something different from what the author intended to express, or intentionally constructed to be confusing. Not quite the same thing as informal vs. formal interpretation.

[Moose-tache]

To me, "divide by half" means "divide in half," and any other interpretation is just misunderstanding the idiom. It's like if you asked people to "go to town on some french fries" and they used the snack as a vehicle to travel to the central business district. If you wanted to ask someone to perform a division problem with a denominator of 0.5, you would say "divide by one half."

[Estav]

To me, "divide by half" means "divide in half," and any other interpretation is just misunderstanding the idiom. It's like if you asked people to "go to town on some french fries" and they used the snack as a vehicle to travel to the central business district. If you wanted to ask someone to perform a division problem with a denominator of 0.5, you would say "divide by one half."

If the person writing/speaking the sentence has such an idiom in their idiolect, then my interpretation would be a case of inter-lectal miscommunication, since this wording is not idiomatic to me. I am suspicious of whether "Divide 500 by half" is idiomatic with that meaning for the majority of people (as opposed to unidiomatic but partially comprehensible wording). A search of Google Books indicated to me that the sequence "divided by half" most often occurs in a context like "divided by half of the circumference" or "divided by half the numbers". "Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one" is used in a portion of Joyce's Ulysses in a passage that includes some arithmetic errors, leading to uncertainty of the intended reading: is this supposed to be an erroneous statement? (Thomas Jackson Rice suggests that "a moment's reflection" leads to the conclusion that the answer should be eight.)

There is one case I found where "divided by half" appears to be used with the sense "divided in half", but it is not constructed as an equation (it simply says that "the whole property ... should be divided by half so as to give the illegitimate son and the adopted son equal shares"). I guess this feels more idiomatic to me than a usage like "4 divided by half is 2", and the intention of the author seems clear. I'm still not sure whether I would use this wording. This example also I think supports my statement that the interpretation is not a matter of formality (this sentence is clearly not at all an informal context), but the interpretation might be related to whether the context is an arithmetic equation with explicit numbers or not.

I certainly agree that "divide by one half" is more idiomatic for "divide by 0.5", but it doesn't affect my interpretation (for comparison, "divide by hundred" is unidiomatic, but I would interpret it as having the same meaning as "divide by one hundred").

[Travis B.]

A search of Google Books indicated to me that the sequence "divided by half" most often occurs in a context like "divided by half of the circumference" or "divided by half the numbers". "Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one" is used in a portion of Joyce's Ulysses in a passage that includes some arithmetic errors, leading to uncertainty of the intended reading: is this supposed to be an erroneous statement? (Thomas Jackson Rice suggests that "a moment's reflection" leads to the conclusion that the answer should be eight.)

I would not take Google Books as a good measure of whether something is idiomatic or not, considering that books tend to largely be written in either literary language or, even when made to sound informal, with a degree of influence from the literary language with a smattering of local color added.

Your answer here seems to sound like that you have adopted a literalistic, prescriptive meaning of "divide by half", when I very highly doubt most actual people would interpret "divide by half" to mean "double" upon hearing it. It is kind of like insisting that negation agreement makes something positive in speech where negation agreement certainly does not mean that.

[Estav]

I would not take Google Books as a good measure of whether something is idiomatic or not, considering that books tend to largely be written in either literary language or, even when made to sound informal, with a degree of influence from the literary language with a smattering of local color added.

Your answer here seems to sound like that you have adopted a literalistic, prescriptive meaning of "divide by half", when I very highly doubt most actual people would interpret "divide by half" to mean "double" upon hearing it. It is kind of like insisting that negation agreement makes something positive in speech where negation agreement certainly does not mean that.

I see it as more similar to Mark Liberman's "misnegation" series on Language Log. Unlike negative concord, misnegations don't just seem to be examples of regular grammatical rules that happen to be proscribed in the standard language. Instead, they seem to be cases where semantic factors somehow cause a formally ungrammatical interpretation to be acceptable, because of its plausibility and the difficulty of parsing the actual grammar of the construction.

Another possible example of acceptable but formally ungrammatical sentences would be "Comparative Illusions" like "More people have been to Russia than I have".

[Travis B.]

I would not take Google Books as a good measure of whether something is idiomatic or not, considering that books tend to largely be written in either literary language or, even when made to sound informal, with a degree of influence from the literary language with a smattering of local color added.

Your answer here seems to sound like that you have adopted a literalistic, prescriptive meaning of "divide by half", when I very highly doubt most actual people would interpret "divide by half" to mean "double" upon hearing it. It is kind of like insisting that negation agreement makes something positive in speech where negation agreement certainly does not mean that.

I see it as more similar to Mark Liberman's "misnegation" series on Language Log. Unlike negative concord, misnegations don't just seem to be examples of regular grammatical rules that happen to be proscribed in the standard language. Instead, they seem to be cases where semantic factors somehow cause a formally ungrammatical interpretation to be acceptable, because of its plausibility and the difficulty of parsing the actual grammar of the construction.

Another possible example of acceptable but formally ungrammatical sentences would be "Comparative Illusions" like "More people have been to Russia than I have".

To me the key thing is that the idea that phrases like "divide by half" ought to follow formal mathematical or logical rules and that they do not have a logic of their own is fallacious and prescriptivist; there is no reason why natural language ought to follow any logic other than its own. Just because one has adopted such rules in one's personal idiolect does not make one's idiolect somehow "better" or "more correct" than varieties which have their own logic to such matters.

[Moose-tache]

Travis is obviously correct. There is no L1 speaker of English anywhere on Earth who hears "divide the cake by half" and understands it as "make a second cake." English does not work that way for anyone, period. I don't know where linguoboy's examples are from, but they are either L2 speakers, or they thought they were reading a math formula, where the pragmatic rules are different and unique to that context.

To get to the root of the confusion, "by half" is used as an adverbial phrase to mean "into two equal sections," while the preposition "by" is also used to introduce a denominator in a division problem or fraction. However, any ambiguity between the two was rectified long ago by popular usage: the adverbial phrase wins as the correct interpretation. To pretending that the preposition wins over the adverbial phrase is to deliberately misunderstand. A good equivalent would be insisting that "inflammable" actually means "fire proof" because you feel that that's what it should mean given the way this prefix is ordinarily used. But universal common usage has ruled differently, and logical or not, that's the world you live in too.

[Raphael]

How do you interpret the expression "divide by half"?

What prompted this is a post that says "Divide 500 by half and add 90. What's the answer?" For several respondents, the answer is ambiguously 1090. For others, it's tentatively 340. I'm in the latter category.

The latter one for me, too; it took me a while to even figure out the mathematical logic behind the former.

[bradrn]

A good equivalent would be insisting that "inflammable" actually means "fire proof" because you feel that that's what it should mean given the way this prefix is ordinarily used. But universal common usage has ruled differently, and logical or not, that's the world you live in too.

I learnt recently that the alternative is equally logical: ‘inflame+able’. This one is a problem of rebracketing rather than common usage.

[Estav]

I don't dispute that usages can become idiomatic by common usage: I already gave the example of "could care less" as a clearly established idiom where it's the compositional breakdown is irrelevant. I'm not saying that it's impossible for "divide by half" to mean "divide in half", I'm just not entirely convinced yet that the use of "by" in this context is as common and established as the other participants in this conversation have said it is. It doesn't feel very familiar to me, which is why I am resorting to looking up examples using tools like Google to try to figure out whether my introspection is likely to be inaccurate (hearing other people's acceptability judgements is also helpful). To be clear, when I said it seemed "sloppy"/"incorrect" to me this was a description of my introspective reaction, not a prescription: I'm not saying other people ought not use it that way, I'm saying that I think I do not generally use it that way. I consider all of the following scenarios possible:

• "divide by half" actually is "universal common usage" and I just don't realize that it's normal for everyone, including me, to use it. Introspection can certainly be deceptive.
• - "divide by half" is common popular usage, but somehow it is not a part or only a marginal part of my idiolect. In that case my introspection would be accurate, but just a weird fact about me as an individual.
• - "divide by half" is a somewhat common usage, but not universal: a significant proportion of English speakers, even if a minority, would find that it sounds odd compared to "divide in half", and would use "divide by half" infrequently compared to that alternative (but would be able to guess at what other people mean when saying "divide by half"). This seems at least possible given how Linguoboy introduced the question.

Something that I would appreciate clarifying: from a point of view of producing rather than interpreting sentences, do all of you (Raphael, Moose-tache, Travis) think that it would be equally likely for you to say "divide the cake by half", "divide the cake in half", and "divide the cake into halves", or do you find one of these options (or some other option) seems more likely? To me, "divide the cake in half" seems the most likely way that I would word it—and that's not because of some rule that I consciously adopted. Likewise, I would say "my brother is in the hospital", not "my brother is in hospital"—even though the second is used by some speakers of English and is understandable to me.

[Estav]

Some other data and another question: the Google Ngram viewer in fact shows no usage of "cake by half", while it does show results for "cake in half" and "divide the cake in half".

I'm curious whether "by half" as a synonym of "in half" is also found acceptable in other contexts ("cut the cake by half", "slice the cake by half") or if it is specifically acceptable with the verb "divide". I did find an online recipe where it is used ("Cut the cake by half horizontally, so you will get the 2 layers of your cake").

[anteallach]

I feel "in half" is the normal way of saying it for me, but my brain interpreted "by half" as a variant of that and not of "by a half", which would be what I'd use if I were actually talking about dividing by the number 1/2.

[Richard W]

I'm curious whether "by half" as a synonym of "in half" is also found acceptable in other contexts ("cut the cake by half", "slice the cake by half") or if it is specifically acceptable with the verb "divide". I did find an online recipe where it is used ("Cut the cake by half horizontally, so you will get the 2 layers of your cake").

I suspect that "by half" is more acceptable when divide has the connotation of diminish. Google results are dominated by tricky arithmetic instructions, but I did find this question:

Does turbo tax take my business entertainment expenses and divide by half or should i do the division before entering the business entertainment figure?

It's difficult to chase the exact semantics, because *divide by third registers as ungrammatical, and divide by a third conjures up the postfix operation ÷⅓.

[Raphael]

I know I'm running the risk of starting one of those "is a calzone a sandwich?" discussions, but I want to ask which writing materials are or aren't covered by the English word "paper". Apparently, papyrus scrolls are, which is already one difference from the German word "Papier". But recently, I saw a website that talked about "parchment paper". Before I saw that website, I had always assumed that pretty much everyone would see parchment as something different from paper.

[Moose-tache]

"parchment paper" would never be used to refer to velum, though, i.e. the original use of the term. If a modern speaker says "parchment paper," you can be sure they're not talking about something that came from a goat. The most common use is a waxy paper-like substance that is used in baking, which I believe also gets called "papier" in German.

Also, I think referring to papyrus as paper is something people would do out of convenience, the same way we might call hakama "trousers," simply because we don't have a better word for them. It doesn't mean that English speakers think papyrus is a canonical example of a type of paper. Same for "parchment paper." They are extensions of a word by necessity, not things that English speakers find indistinguishable from a notebook.

[Travis B.]

In informal speech I use divide in half, divide by half, divide by a half, divide in halves, and divide into halves readily (I am not sure of the exact frequency of each) while in formal speech I tend to avoid divide by half and divide by a half when I am paying attention to my own speech, probably under prescriptive influence.