Fifty Divided By Fifty

I can tell you plain and simple why our empire has gone into decline: because the devil is in the details, and we just can't be bothered with that sort of piddly crap anymore.

Case in point: the title and tagline of the recent film 50/50. Everyone knows Asian kids are better at math, right? So ask any Chinese second grader what the likelihood is for an event with a probability of 50/50, and he'll^* tell you it's 1. That is, the outcome is given. Because 50/50 is a fraction, and fifty divided by fifty is one. Child's play.

Having screened the film myself, I can tell you that this was not the intent of the title. The movie is about how the kid from Angels In The Outfield might not live until the credits. The title is a reference to the phrase "50-50," an American colloquialism dating from 1913^** used to describe even odds. As in, there's a 50% chance he'll live and a 50% chance he'll die.

In probability terms, his odds are 50:50. That's "fifty to fifty against." As in, if he lived a hundred times, he'd die fifty of those times.

So why the glaring typographical error? I posit that it's because we're Americans and we don't give a damn about math or technical accuracy -- and why should we? Iceberg, Goldberg.

Then there's the tagline: "It takes a pair to beat the odds." Ha ha, I get it. It's a plague on words. "A pair" might refer either to the film's two male costars or to proverbial testicles. But here's the thing -- you can't beat even odds. The outcome is as likely to occur as it isn't. We're talking about the only kind of odds that aren't in anybody's favor -- they're dead even. There's nothing to beat.

Right now you probably think this stuff is nitpicky... you also probably always lose at craps because you love flinging chips at the dealer and screaming "HARD WAYS!"

I'd lay ten to one that the Chinese steamroll us over the next few decades.

--Dan Colgate

---

^* Any given Chinese second grader is most likely male.
^** Per Merriam Webster.