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

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

"Fewer water" sounds odd now because no-one does use it: but if it were somehow to become as commonplace as "less cookies" is, then I would see no reason to object to it.

I don't think that the distinction between "less" and "fewer" is a significant one: it's a distinction only of usage ("one should be used with counts, the other with quantities"), not of meaning. After all, we're all perfectly happy to say "more cookies" but also "more water".

So if people wish to maintain the distinction themselves, for aesthetic reasons, that's absolutely fine: but I don't think they have a case for attempting to enforce it on others.

"Uninterested / disinterested" etc I feel are worth fighting over, because they can be used to express genuinely different meanings. But I don't think that's true of "less" and "fewer".

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Indeed - off-hand I can't think of a sentence in which "less X" and "fewer X" convey distinct meanings for any value of X. Unless there is one, the difference serves only as a shibboleth, not as an aid to communication.

Of course the fact that it serves as a shibboleth doesn't mean that the difference in usage isn't real, just that it is valuable only to pedants.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, that's a clear way of putting it -- I should have said sthg like that up top, instead of ranting, I guess.