Having "less" and "fewer" available as distinct has the advantage that they can be used to express different ideas. What corresponding advantage is conferred by overloading the former?
I don't think they do express significantly different ideas. If they did, it wouldn't be practical to use "more" as the antithesis of both.
a few hundred years of ongoing misuse!
Do you have a way of distinguishing evolutionary shift in use from "misuse"? Many modern accepted usages were considered misuses by our predecessors. I think if a shift in use has become sufficiently dominant, then it's nonsensical to continue talking of it as a misuse. Otherwise the standard you're trying to hold the language up to is an ideal one that no longer exists.
As an example, the (not very) modern use of "you" as the general second person pronoun, which confusingly blurs the distinction between singular and plural. We can probably all think of times when saying "you", people have been unsure whether one person or several were referred to. Doesn't your argument suggest that we should go back to using "thou"?
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Date: 2008-09-05 11:49 am (UTC)I don't think they do express significantly different ideas. If they did, it wouldn't be practical to use "more" as the antithesis of both.
a few hundred years of ongoing misuse!
Do you have a way of distinguishing evolutionary shift in use from "misuse"? Many modern accepted usages were considered misuses by our predecessors. I think if a shift in use has become sufficiently dominant, then it's nonsensical to continue talking of it as a misuse. Otherwise the standard you're trying to hold the language up to is an ideal one that no longer exists.
As an example, the (not very) modern use of "you" as the general second person pronoun, which confusingly blurs the distinction between singular and plural. We can probably all think of times when saying "you", people have been unsure whether one person or several were referred to. Doesn't your argument suggest that we should go back to using "thou"?