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

[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.

[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.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I'm very happy with that line of thinking: it seems obvious that different registers of usage are approriate for different contexts. So "10 items or less" is moving into appropriateness in the context of supermarkets, but not everyone feels it's got there yet: that's fine, I don't agree but I respect the opinion. But I haven't seen any critiques along those sensible lines; it's all been about it being "wrong" in some imaginary absolute sense.