English usage and grammar

365 readers

9 users here now

A community to discuss and ask questions about English usage and grammar.

If your post refers to a specific English variant, please indicate it within square brackets (for instance [Canadian]).

Online resources:

Cambridge English Dictionary
Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus
Gilman's Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. This is a great and witty reference about usage, its history, and its controveries

Sibling communities:

[email protected]

Rules of conduct:

The usual ones on Lemmy and Mastodon.. In short: be kind or at least respectful, no offensive language, no harassment, no spam.

(Icon: entry "English" in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1933. Banner: page from Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale".)

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Less vs. Fewer (self.english)

submitted 1 year ago by OsakaWilson to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Of course the official rule is that for countable things, like apples, we say fewer, as in, "Why are there fewer apples?" And for things that you can't really count, you use less, as in "We need more dream time and less screen time."

But recently, even from native speakers who've been to university, you can hear people using 'less' when the grammar books say they should use 'fewer'. Language changes and there are many examples of things that we say differently than we write. What are your thoughts?

Should we grammar nazi this until everyone gets back in line? Should we just let language evolve and enjoy the ride? Do you think it will settle in with spoken and written forms being different? Do you think this will become the norm in English?

By the way, I blame supermarkets with their "9 items or less" signs.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

hey, all good points. I was just trying to say that if one had to pursue logical consistency (which is my perception of the theme of the entire thread), then countability becomes a math problem.

also is this not contradictory? or do you mean correspond as in each number can be assigned to an integer?

no, and yes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

meh, i'd say in general language isn't logically consistent with maths. the english language doubly so. maths has to have prescriptive rules that are internally consistent, english has descriptive rules that are more often broken than followed

no, and yes

i guess that makes sense, i suppose