Halve Not

| 4 Comments

A Debit to Reuters for posting a 19th century headline—and getting it wrong.

The topic is undergarments. Specifically, Hanesbrands, about which Reuters had this announcement on October 29: “Hanesbrands Q3 profit more than halves.”

In plain English, they are telling us that Hanesbrands’ third quarter profit fell 59 percent. In Reuters-speak, which appears regularly, the profit apparently “halved,” and then some.

We have two problems here.

One, the verb “halve.” It is the kind of word that you read every now and then, especially in cookbooks, but never really use, because nowadays people (except headline writers) prefer the more natural “cut in half.”

And yet Reuters not only uses the clunky term—to save space, perhaps—but modifies it with “more than.”

The even bigger problem is that Reuters’ construction is just plain wrong. According to Merriam Webster, “halve” is what grammar geeks call a transitive verb, meaning that it must have an object. As in, “He halved the apple.” Subject. Verb. Object.

Not that you’re likely to hear such a phrase anytime soon. But, nonetheless, it is correct. So Q3 profit can’t “halve.” Rather, something (subject) has to halve (verb) the profit (object).

Get it, Reuters?

Just to make it entirely clear, we offer you one of the more modern examples of “halve” from the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, which traces word usage over time. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1789: “The fervid Sun had more than halved the day.”

Romantic poet right. Reuters wrong.

4 Comments

Elinore: Try searching the dictionaries at this site--http://angli02.kgw.tu-berlin.de/call/webofdic/diction1.html

At the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary on-line you will see: "If something halves, it is reduced by half." As in: "Their profits have halved in the last six months."

What we need to do is settle on a method for handling these questions.

Elinore: If you enter "halve" in One-Look Dictionary at the site I have given you, you will note that you need to dig deeper. Also, if you consult the print Longman Business English Dictionary (2000), you will find: "Since the boom, the currency halved and the bottom fell out of the luxury-car market."

The best place to start is with corpus dictionaries, such as the COBUILD, Oxford, or Cambridge advanced learner's. Next, business English dictionaries are useful. To get the range, you can just enter in Google what you are looking at.

How you have gone about it is arbitrary, a reflection of the fact that schools and universities are not employing COBUILD grammars, or the Longman Advanced American Dictionary, or the Longman Language Activator in an intelligent and integrated way.

If we examined the Language Log blog, we would be surprised at the triviality of the entries and comments. The blog often contains entries condemning the lapses of language traditionalists, but the bloggers do not even bother to explain how to exploit the corpus revolution in Linguistics to make better judgments about language.

The standards in language columns in the US (and all over the English-speaking world) are extremely low. It is impossible to account for the triviality of such columns in The New York Times. The writer of the most consistently atrocious of these columns should retire immediately. You know who he is, the scar on the Sunday landscape.

If we understood language, we would begin with a meticulous study of counterfactuals--what might have happened if things had been different--in the COBUILD Intermediate and English grammars. We would then mark up the many counterfactuals in "Great Expectations." We would sensitize ourselves to meanings and grammar patterns in the Oxford Collocations Dictionary and the COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary. We would know how to triangulate by linking a text--a novel, for example--to a grammar and a word book so that each of the three reinforced the others.

You need to refocus your judgment here because the evidence is powerfully against you. You will find plenty of errors in newspapers without inventing them.

I suggest that Columbia's Journalism School refuse to have anything to do with IELTS, TOEFL, or GRE, but instead set up a general curriculum for applicants and for any admissions writing.

If there is going to be a writing test reflecting knowledge of current affairs, then there should be a list of newspapers, websites, and books to be assimilated. "Terror and Consent" by Philip Bobbitt would be excellent, as well as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

The idea of relying on TOEFL or IELTS is absurd. Even if the School were just to require knowledge of the COBUILD Intermediate English Grammar, the Longman Advanced American Dictionary, and the Longman Language Activator, along with 8 or 10 websites, as the basis of an English admissions test, that would be a huge improvement.

Perhaps the news of the ETS Europe collapse in UK marking has not reached Columbia yet. ETS and Kaplan should be driven away from any participation in American universities.

Elinore, I think that Monday morning Columbia U. should make the Longman Business English Dictionary (2007) official for all students in this subject area. COBUILD has a useful business vocabulary book, but it is not clearly superior to the Longman BED, which is readily available.

The verb "halve" in the Longman BED is marked [I,T] for intransitive or transitive (intransitive: "to go down to half of a previous amount, level etc..."): "The share value of internet stocks has halved over the past three months." In the Collins COBUILD Student's Dictionary (2005), an extremely good introductory work: "When you halve something, or when it halves, it is reduced to half its previous size or amount." For example, "Sales of vinyl records halved in 1992 to just 6.7m." The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (2005) has: "The shares have halved in value."

There are only two great teaching grammars of English: the Collins COBUILD Intermediate English Grammar and the COBUILD English Grammar. Columbia should require that students be familiar with the first before admission, and also make the second official for all university courses. There is no need for a committee to study this matter Harvard-style. Members of the committee would be unable to make accurate judgments, and it would take the group an eternity to figure out how to adopt the corpus revolution in Linguistics.

Columbia should post a full list of proposed official English books and open up comments for 30 days. Unless someone came forward to say that there were better books than the COBUILD grammars, the Longman Advanced American Dictionary, and the Longman Language Activator, these books should become official for four years.

It is especially important that professors in Education understand these books and how to integrate them with texts such as "Terror and Consent" and "Tree of Smoke." The failure of orientation to these corpus books will compound the disarray in American English teaching. There should be a comprehensive audit of all obsolete practices, and the severe opportunity costs of continuing with TOEFL.

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