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because expensiveness is a scale that starts from 0 so you always know how expensive everything is. cheapness works the other way, so there’s no starting point. that means there’s no way to quantify how cheap the first thing is, in order to double that. in your example gasoline would have to be the least cheap thing possible, which means nothing can be more expensive.

it’s like saying someone’s twice as short as someone else. half as tall makes sense, twice as short is a weird way to say it because how short is the first person?

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ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
“Cheaper” means “less expensive”. 2x cheaper means 2x less expensive, or less expensive by a factor of 2, or 0.5x as expensive. I can say 2x shorter, 2x slower etc. and I don’t see a problem. Everyone I know would understand that it’s the reciprocal of the original price, although I get that in a country whose president can say he slashed proces by 500 % without instantly having to resign, fractions and percentages might have to be specified but that’s longer to say for the same number of significant figures.

Yes, I can find people debating “two times cheaper” (English) but not “zweimal billiger” (German) or “dvakrát levnější” (Czech), in fact the phrase is often used in promotional material. The only results suggesting it’s wrong are English Reddit discussions’ automatic translations to German or Czech, and Google’s AI summary that cotes them.

I won’t stop using it just because people with inferior education sometimes don’t get it. Similarly, I provided the metric value and conversion rate, it’s Americans who need to practice mental math.

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- CriticalThought@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  I won’t stop using it just because people with inferior education sometimes don’t get it.
  
  I doubt anyone doesn’t get it, it just sounds twice as unnatural to a native English speaker.
  
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  - ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Whatever, I’m not convincing anyone with my use of metric and username. I’m avoiding some other weird phrases though, for example you won’t usually see me type “14 days” in English although Czech speakers prefer it to “2 weeks” (idk why, it’s the same number of syllables).
    
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