Lessening prices?

[lolwhites]

Improved quality and lessening prices have seen digital cameras grow in popularity and this year sales will outstrip the 35mm by 15 to 1.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4130620.stm

Can you lessen a price? Shouldn't that be "lower", "lowering" or "falling" or am I being pedantic?

[metal56]

Improved quality and lessening prices have seen digital cameras grow in popularity and this year sales will outstrip the 35mm by 15 to 1.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4130620.stm

Can you lessen a price? Shouldn't that be "lower", "lowering" or "falling" or am I being pedantic?

I couldn't find one example in the BNC.

google: English 1 - 28 for "lessening prices"

[LarryLatham]

Improved quality and lessening prices have seen digital cameras grow in popularity and this year sales will outstrip the 35mm by 15 to 1.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4130620.stm

Can you lessen a price? Shouldn't that be "lower", "lowering" or "falling" or am I being pedantic?

Do you find the meaning in this context to be obscure or confusing? Or do you think other people might? If so you might have a point. If not, maybe you are being pedantic.

Larry Latham

[ontheway]

"lessening prices" is incorrect
"lowering prices" is incorrect

try "falling prices" or "declining prices" instead

But what do I know. I spend all day "lessoning students."

Thar, that'll larn ya!

[Stephen Jones]

I know some teachers whose whole career has consisted of "lessening students."

[lolwhites]

Sure, Larry, the meaning of "lessening prices" is perfectly clear. Then again, as teachers, how often do we come across mistakes when it's perfectly clear what the student was trying to say.

Let me put it another way: If one of your students wrote The shopkeeper decided to lessen his prices., do you think it would warrant a red mark in the margin?

[LarryLatham]

Sure, Larry, the meaning of "lessening prices" is perfectly clear. Then again, as teachers, how often do we come across mistakes when it's perfectly clear what the student was trying to say.

Let me put it another way: If one of your students wrote The shopkeeper decided to lessen his prices., do you think it would warrant a red mark in the margin?

Well then, lolwhites, do you suspect the BBC was "trying to say" something it didn't actually succeed in saying, such as is sometimes the case with students?

But of course, if a student wrote that, I would mark a note to her about the unlikely collocation. But please note: The BBC didn't write anything. If anything was written, it was a quotation from a broadcast. Apples and oranges. (Both are fruits, but what a difference!) And the BBC is not a student. Being the BBC, we are on fairly safe ground to assume that the English we hear there is likely to be within bounds of general acceptance. (Meaning that it can be debated, perhaps, but you'd better be careful not to make a fool of yourself by declaring out of hand that it is "incorrect". You could end up with egg on your face.) Calling this a "mistake" would probably get you in hot water fast.

Larry Latham

[LarryLatham]

I had a look at the link after I wrote the post above, and see that the statement in question may indeed have been written rather than spoken. I'm not totally sure, but I may have been wrong about that.

But my point still stands. Here is a quote from a World Bank report from July, 2002 about housing development:

"Furthermore, although in some countries the lack of titles or any use rights does not have
much effect on market operations (apart from lessening prices), in some others -
particularly in African countries..."

Is the World Bank incorrect too?

Or, how about the Victorian Women's Writers Project of Indiana University? Here is a selection from some poetry found there:

"My father tells me, Martha, we are wrong,
And have been quite mistaken all along,
About the expenses he has had to meet,
With lessening prices for his oats and wheat.
I asked him if he meant me still to live
Beneath his roof He would no answer give,
Nor seemed the idea willingly to come,
That I must sometime seek a separate home."

Is this also wrong? Should we mark these "mistakes" with a red pen?

I think the real problem may be that the question you posed was misleading to begin with. The BBC statement did not imply that someone "lessened" the prices. Rather, it seems to suggest that market conditions led to a lessening of prices. Your student (or rather my student, I guess) who wrote The shopkeeper decided to lessen his prices would have rated the red mark not because there is anything wrong with 'lessen prices' as a collocation, as I see it now, but rather because lessening prices appear to be a result of environmental conditions rather than of deliberate acts of people. While circumstances may lessen prices, shopkeepers lower them.


Larry Latham

[ontheway]

I'm afraid that I would have to mark both the BBC and the World Bank with big red markers. Both are incorrect.

Someone might have "less" money than you.

One price could be "less" than another.

But, you cannot "lessen" a price. (Unless you are intending to insult someone's prices and theirby diminish their character.)

Finally, environmental factors cannot "lessen" prices either, since it is still up to the shopkeepers to reduce them. (economics 101)

1 Poetry is poetry. Grammar and normal language are often ignored for style.
2 The World Bank has a huge staff of non native English speakers.
3 Having listened to the BBC daily for several years, I can state unequivocally that they are indeed in need of some language and grammar teachers. (Although they have a nice accent sometimes.)

[lolwhites]

I'm not sure whether it's fair to say the examples are wrong as such, but I'd certainly draw a student's attention to it if they were to use the collocation and suggest they use something safer in their exam. New phrases come in and out of fashion all the time and I'm not convinced that this one has caught on.

Incidentally, if you listen to the BBC News you may have noticed that the language they use is pretty cliched. When I was in the UK I preferred to get my TV news from Channel 4.

[LarryLatham]

I'm afraid that I would have to mark both the BBC and the World Bank with big red markers. Both are incorrect.

Someone might have "less" money than you.

One price could be "less" than another.

But, you cannot "lessen" a price. (Unless you are intending to insult someone's prices and theirby diminish their character.)

Finally, environmental factors cannot "lessen" prices either, since it is still up to the shopkeepers to reduce them. (economics 101)

1 Poetry is poetry. Grammar and normal language are often ignored for style.
2 The World Bank has a huge staff of non native English speakers.
3 Having listened to the BBC daily for several years, I can state unequivocally that they are indeed in need of some language and grammar teachers. (Although they have a nice accent sometimes.)

Well, there are 455,000 hits on Google for "lessening prices". I suppose they could all be 'wrong', but it does suggest that it's a collocation that gets a fair amount of use.

I'm afraid this looks like another sad case of, "It's wrong because I've never heard it." Despite the massive exposure native speakers have to English (which comprises the entire reason so many schools are eager to hire native speaker 'teachers'), the language is bigger than any single person. There are lots of perfectly good English expressions that perhaps none of us here have encountered. That, by itself, does not make them wrong.

Perhaps another way to look at "lessening prices" that you all might find more acceptable is to note that "lessening prices" are a kind of price. One that is in motion, from higher to lower. One does not lessen a price, maybe, but one can have the condition of "lessening prices".

Larry Latham

[ontheway]

Give it up. If your only hope of defending bad English is through an internet search, where anyone can post without editing, then you have no hope at all. In addition, 450,000 hits seems pretty low for a "word". One major story released from the World Bank and repeated on the BBC would generate thousands of hits. Try looking up some other words that YOU personally hear but believe are not words.

Yes, there are some dictonaries that rashly include every new combination of ABCs they can find to show how hip and current they are. I tell my students that those dictionaries are trash and to avoid buying them or to replace them with others I recommend. I believe in a more conservative approach to language. There were hundreds of new words and expressions spawned in the 60s and 70s which have long since passed away and sound so foolish in movies and TV reruns of that era. Many of the current fad words and expressions of today will meet a similar fate.

The case of "lessening prices" is even more clear. It was undoubtably and error by some unskilled writer tossed into a writing position. Any decent college or university professor in Business, Accounting or Economics would mark this wrong, not to mention the English writing department.

Students have limited vocabularies, limited time to learn and limited abilities. They should be taught to use the best possible language that will serve them well throughout their careers and their lives. Having majored in Business (among other majors) and having worked professionally in and taught Business, Economics and Accounting, I can assure you that the expression is not a professionally accepted term among upper level managers and other career gatekeepers.

"Lessening Prices" is not currently an acceptable English expression. Maybe it will be someday.

[Metamorfose]

"Lessening Prices" is not currently an acceptable English expression. Maybe it will be someday.

If you say so, you also agree that it must have a start point and this start point is not only one or two people who are simply inventing language, don't you?

José

[JuanTwoThree]

"I believe in a more conservative approach to language"

How conservative do you want? A supreme court decision from 1938 is conservative enough?

"Assuming that the charge for selling by traders would operate to lessen prices obtainable by producers from them, no unjust discrimination results, for obviously charges for the two sales of the same animals reasonably may be more than that exacted for the first one"

http://laws.findlaw.com/us/304/470.html

Or an 1876 translation from the Japanese? Though this expression might have been one of the 1998 textual modernisations and so tainted by just not being old enough, even if the moderniser was a Cal State Professor.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1873kume.html

Your defence seems to be that you have never heard this expression yourself and you should know. I'm a 48 year old, English Language and Literature graduate, very widely read and travelled, half my working life in retail (fine wines if you're interested) and half in TEFL blah blah blah but so what? and I can assure you that the expression, though unusual, exists. Stalemate I think.

It reminds me of a villager who lives in a parish whose church has no spire. All the immediately surrounding churches are spireless as well. As are all the churches as far as the horizon in all directions. So he says " I've seen a lot of churches and churches don't have spires". It should occur to him that he might just be wrong.

[Stephen Jones]

Dear ontheway

You may think that you are the bees knees, and God's gift to linguistic standards, but you come across as a rather silly crank.

To misquote one of these trashy, faddish wirters who was always coining new words to show how hip and current he was
"There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than is dreamt of in your philosophy."