Of those 72…
Why can we assume that the people that Bilbo “likes half as well as they deserve” are drawn exclusively from the set of people he does not know “half as well as he should like”?
To put it another way, are we sure that there are no red hobbits in the top half (blue section) of the chart?
Also, I doubt his dislike for the Sackville-Bagginses amounts to liking them less than they deserve, in his judgement. Anyone who deserves to be disliked doesn’t get counted in that number, unless he dislikes them even more than that.
Yeah, there’s got to be some he knows well enough and dislikes them more than he should.
“Less than half of you half”
isn’t that 1-35, not 1-71?
It’s more simple:
More then half (a majority) of the people he wishes he’d known better
Less then half (a minority)he doesn’t like as much as he thinks they deserve (but they do deserve to be liked).
So there’s nothing about the Sackvilles in those lines.
Yet the people that go unmentioned fall in neither of those categories, he doesn’t wish to know them better nor does he believe they deserve to be liked.
That’s why the lines are so diplomatic, he doesn’t say anything mean implicitly
