It's a question of where one wants to draw the line with respect to adopting errors into acceptable usage
And of what you count as "errors". This is a pretty fertile area for pretension1 to creep in, whether self-aware or not.
So in this case I don't think it is an error at all. Usage of "less" to cover count quantities as well as continuous ones is sufficently widespread and historical that to claim that it has a canonical meaning that excludes counts is nonsensical.
I don't know enough about type theory to really address that point, except to say that English is clearly pretty weakly typed in places -- so it seems to me that while sometimes type errors are not meaningless, in places where a putative type error doesn't actually have any effect on interpreted meaning of the phrase, it then is indeed meaningless.
1 I believe Google Chrome is correct2. "Pretention" is AFAIK just a legal term meaning trying to claim sthg that you have no real right to. 2 FSVO "correct" as per larger discussion.
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Date: 2008-09-05 11:17 am (UTC)And of what you count as "errors". This is a pretty fertile area for pretension1 to creep in, whether self-aware or not.
So in this case I don't think it is an error at all. Usage of "less" to cover count quantities as well as continuous ones is sufficently widespread and historical that to claim that it has a canonical meaning that excludes counts is nonsensical.
I don't know enough about type theory to really address that point, except to say that English is clearly pretty weakly typed in places -- so it seems to me that while sometimes type errors are not meaningless, in places where a putative type error doesn't actually have any effect on interpreted meaning of the phrase, it then is indeed meaningless.
1 I believe Google Chrome is correct2. "Pretention" is AFAIK just a legal term meaning trying to claim sthg that you have no real right to.
2 FSVO "correct" as per larger discussion.