Linguists?

[undyingking]

From the BBC news magazine:

"Tesco is changing its checkout signs after coming under criticism from linguists for using "less" rather than "fewer". But it's not just huge, multinational supermarkets that get confused about this grammatical point. The grammatical question of fewer versus less has been raising the hackles of plain English speakers for years."

I see two errors in this excerpt.

• First, it would be more accurate to say that Tesco has come under criticism not from linguists, but from pedants. (Some of whom may also be linguists, or at least think of themselves as such, but that's not what characterizes them in this context.)
• Second, plain English speakers couldn't give half an etiolated toss about fewer vs less, because they care about clarity of communication rather than smug pseudo-intellectual one-upmanship about fanciful and arbitrary grammatical "rules".
  

I've never understood why so many English-speakers seem keen to stifle their language -- the most versatile, flexible, powerful and expressive in the world. I'm pretty sure though that it is a social / intellectual insecurity thing -- if you know a bunch of made-up signifiers by which you can claim that you are "right" and lots of other people are "wrong", you mark yourself out as somehow better than the norm.

(Please note that I'm not saying that there should be no rules in English; that would be ridiculous. What I'm saying is that some of what are claimed as rules -- like less vs fewer, not splitting an infitive, not ending a sentence with a preposition, etc -- are meaningless, hallowed neither by usage tradition nor by innate sense, and frankly pathetic.)

Comments

Re: Points granted but

[a-llusive.livejournal.com]

depends - some superfluous words (extinct trades etc) I'm happy to admit should go but which superflous synonyms are you happy to strip? I like having a language with a thick thesarus.

[a-llusive.livejournal.com]

Sufficiently used over time.
Otherwise 'like' would be considered to equal 'ahem' as well as its other significances.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

just because it is commonly misused and sounds more familiar to our ears does not make it correct

As you can deduce, I think quite the opposite. I think it's fundamental to the evolution of language that a sufficient weight of usage defines acceptability. You might have seen my point about "you" for the second person singular pronoun: that was once thought incorrect, but now it would be distinctly eccentric to claim it so. Usage doesn't remain fixed at what it was when the words entered the language, and it's by the process of "misuse" and acceptance that these shifts take place. If the notion of correctness doesn't move with them, then it's a sterile concept.

I also think of memes as a useful concept rather than anything more concrete, but it's in just this kind of thing where they find that usefulness. Many people are by now aware that some say "10 items or less", others "fewer". If over time we observe that one of these versions has come to dominate over the other, then we can characterize that as that meme having won. Whether the winner is more or less acceptable to academic consideration is irrelevant: if people continue to prefer "less", in time "fewer" will sound as quaint as "thou", however many arguments are mounted for its historical correctness.

Re: Points granted but

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

They'll still be in the thesaurus for poets to retrieve and polish: just not cluttering up supermarket signs ;-)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Absolutely.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

In that case I refer you to my reply to him ;-)

Re: Points granted but

[a-llusive.livejournal.com]

But usage defines whether a word is still part of the language or not. Tipping words towards obsolescence eventually tumbles them out of the thesaurus.

Recognition is vital. The OED is full of obsolete words poets would no longer choose to use because readers without the OED couldn't understand their meaning.

Re: Points granted but

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

True: but no-one's crying out to bring all of those back into usage. There's a whole slope of depth of usage, from supermarket signs at the top end to obsolescence at the bottom, with poetry somewhere inbetween. All those obsolete words at have made that journey downwards, whether quickly or very gradually: it seems quixotic to want to prevent it ever happening again to any other word.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

I think I more or less agree with you about "fewer". But what am I to do about the scrolling sign at the kids' school which has encouraged me to have a "successfull" term for over a year now, despite my having a word with the receptionist on at least one occasion. Should I find it completely neutral because it is totally unambiguous, and (unlike theoclarke's example above doesn't even require pause for thought to sort it out?

Does the fact that it makes me steadily more inclined to leap over the barrier, find the bloody computer and change it myself, screaming "You're a fucking school! Do you not have a single fucking dictionary, or one member of staff who gives a damn about spelling!" mark me out as a tragic anorak-wearing pedant?

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

Less vs fewer isn't fanciful and arbitrary! It's a question of what the words actually mean! They mean different things! Fewer means fewer items. Less means less stuff. Fundamentally different.

In this case, though, the wording doesn't bother me, because I don't read it as '10 items or fewer items', I read it as '10 items or less shopping'. In my mind, there's an invisible comma - '10 items, or less.'

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I suppose that depends on how well-established that spelling now is. My feeling is not very, in which case it's legitimate to describe it as "functionally incorrect" under today's usage pattern. And to feel and act accordingly.

But if it was a genuinely established variant spelling (eg. realise for realize) that you just happen not to prefer, then such a reaction would indeed be inappropriate.

Saying that, consensus about spelling usage seems to be more easily reached than consensus about grammatical usage -- I suspect because variant spelling isn't apparent in speech, only in writing.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

So Tescos could have written, '10 items or less, innit'? To borrow the classic Radio 4 whinge.

How about 'aint'? That's ancient. 100-200 years ago, even the upper crust used it. But they didn't consider it 'correct' then, and we don't consider it 'correct' now.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

The fact that "less" is commonly used to mean "fewer" is not because of the laudable vivacity of the English language, it is because so little effort is put into teaching even rudimentary English grammar in British schools, that most people genuinely do not understand that there is a difference.

Bravo.

Americans are generally much better educated in English Grammar than most British people are (and I really don't like having to admit that).

It's true. But they have *different* rules, of course, in many cases.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

My point is that if people predominantly use a word to mean something, then it's futile to insist that it "actually" means something different. Meanings of all sorts of words shift over time, following usage.

Elsewhere on here I've used the example of the word "you", which used to just mean the second person plural. Gradually it also absorbed the second-person-singular meaning of "thou", in just the same way that "less" is currently absorbing the meaning of "fewer" in this context. In time, saying "10 items or fewer" will sound as quaint as "thou" does now. People back in the C18 complained about this misuse of "you", but wouldst thou prefer to drag modern English back to the defeated usage?

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

we don't consider it 'correct' now

I do, in contexts where it's the dominant usage. Which is a limited set of contexts, but they exist.

Of course there are people who believe that there's only one correct version of English, and that any variation on that, be it dialect, argot or whatever, is essentially wrong, but I find that a pretty narrow and unappealing intellectual position.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

That would be pointless, but I don't consider the two comparable. Mainly because we're nowhere near that point yet with less and fewer, but also because 'you' was not gradually substituted for 'thou' through ignorance, but rather it was always used to refer to singular persons when the speaker was trying to be polite. Like tu/vous. We just expanded our *social* rules about when it was approriate to be polite.

I'm afraid you're going to have to find a different example if you want to convince me, but even if you did I suspect much more time would be involved. This one isn't a question of simple shifting usage, it's a questionof ignorance. 'Nice', for example, has shifted over time from meaning 'particular' to meaning... well, nice. But that wasn't a question of ignorance, it was a question of a very gradually shifting usage. 'Fewer' and 'less' haven't shifted gradually over time, they've suddenly started to be abused because people don't know what they bloody mean. If this continues, then yes, in a while, perhaps several decades, the distinction will be genuinely archaic. But we're nowhere near that point yet. And if Tescos had specifically written 'less items' rather than just 'less', I think the phrasing would bother a lot more people than it currently does.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

A thought experiment. Imagine a usage which is standard in the US, but considered "incorrect" in UK English. Are people in the US wrong to use it? Would people in the UK be wrong to use it? What about US people who come to the UK? What about UK people who first came across it on US TV programmes, before encountering the "correct" UK equivalent?

(I can't think of a good example just now and I have to go and make dinner, but you can see where I'm going with this.)

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

I think for 'correct' in that example we could perhaps substitute "appropriate for neutral written communication (such as a public sign)"? Then almost everyone would agree with you about "ain't" - less/fewer would still be open to debate.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

But people did kick and scream about "nice", and there were certainly people after a decade or two who apparently didn't know the original meaning, which drove the older generation mad.

Actually I'd be much more prepared to go to the barricades for 'nice', archaic as it is, than I would for 'fewer', because it's a genuinely useful term and difficult to substitute. That being said, I did wince when Charlie and Lola referred to a book with "less words" today.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

Alright. How about 'should of' instead of 'should have'?

For me it doesn't get more 'just plain wrong' than that - but it certainly is common.

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

Nice is a complicated one in any case. What you probably think of as the original meaning (precise and specific) is not the original meaning; it's just the one that preceded the current usage. To the best of my knowledge, the original English meaning of "nice" approximates to "silly". I will try to find a reference for that at some point, if I can be arsed.

As for Charlie and Lola, I can only say that Lola absolutely hardly ever never uses conventional grammar! ;-)

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

Thou/You - Tu/Vous. Exactly. What she said. (I have no idea who you are floralaetifica, but I like the cut of your jib)!
Also, we do still use it in Yorkshire (with the same connotations of familiarity), although usually pronounced "tha".

But it's a very good example of why these things are worth preserving. By losing the words "thou" and "thee" from demotic English, we have lost the capacity to differentiate in a single pronoun between formal and familiar in the second person, plus second person plural (formal and familiar) from the language, which is found useful in most other European languages to this day.

Sticking to the assertion that the only validity a word has is its popularity, regardless of its usefulness, versatility, specificity seems to me to be an incredibly narrow viewpoint. VHS beat Betamax, but most people accept that Betamax was the superior technology, and just because the masses prefer one word to another, it really does not make that word right, good, better or even accurate; it just makes it popular. Populist even. If common usage becomes so dominant that the original word is pushed out of general usage altogether, then it is a loss, and if railing against that is quixotic, I can live with it; I consider quixotic tendencies to be among the more elevated virtues!

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

You'll be pleased to hear that US municipal codes seem to use "less" instead of "fewer" almost universally, and that I was well and truly stetted when, as a novice proofreader, I tentatively suggested the correction.

[crowleycrow.livejournal.com]

The reason is clarity of thought, and fineness of distinction, not historical usage or the self-regard of pedants or the corruption and decline of the present (real as that is). You don't want to make them equivalent unless they are truly interchangeable, and they aren't: you might find "less cookies" unobjectionable, but you'd surely never say "fewer water."

It may well be that the distinction arose late in historical use precisely to express a difference. Why lose a distinction just on the claim "who cares, we all get it"? On that standard, we can use "uninterested" and "disinterested" to mean the same thing, and lose a word from the language; "continuous" and "continual" may well once have been equivalent, but now they're not -- not to me and many other people who like fine distinctions.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

I have no idea who you are [info]floralaetifica, but I like the cut of your jib)!

Why thank you, sir!

Also, we do still use it in Yorkshire

I nearly made that point myself!