Grammar a thousand times more correct?








We seem to get it right with "twice." But when the numbers get higher, we tend to fall into "100 times better." Yet the better usage isn't that hard to get right, and it's often worth it for clarity.

The other "times more" that weekend was the title of a book: "A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice." It's by Kenji Yoshino, a New York University law professor. The idea is that the Bard provides legal insight into events of our own times, from the O.J. Simpson trial (cf. "Othello") to Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court confirmation. You may recall how "empathy" became something of a dirty word during her hearings. But compare "Measure for Measure," with its contrast between by-the-book enforcement of the rules and a more compassionate approach to justice.

The title of Yoshino's book is a quotation from "The Merchant of Venice," one of Portia's lines to Bassanio:

[F]or you I would be trebled twenty times myself;

A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich.

Well, there you go, the voices from the peanut gallery shout. Shakespeare did it, so it can't be wrong, can it? One might quibble whether the professor made fair use of the "fair" line, since it appears the Bard used fair to mean "beautiful" rather than "just."

There's something to the peanut gallery argument. The rules of a language are ultimately made by its speakers and writers, and in this Shakespeare counts for more than most of us. But the Bard could easily have written "a thousand times as fair," and been just as clear – though not, perhaps, a thousand times as right.

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