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

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Going back is a whole different matter! But yes, I definitely agree that it would be better to have kept the distinction.

If they did, it wouldn't be practical to use "more" as the antithesis of both.

Not true. It's practical because analysing the noun almost always gives away which sense is intended.

Still, I suppose that allows you to argue that less-as-fewer is different from most other type errors because it would also have this property.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose that is what I'm arguing really, although I leapt over that to say that (therefore) there's not a significant distinction between them as modifiers.

How do you decide whether a change is "going back" or not? Clearly Tesco's are being asked to go back, because the "fewer" usage is rarer now than it used to be, and advocates want to reverse that tide. But some people (Quakers etc) still use "thou": in theory, that could be reversed as well if enough people wanted to. At what point of widespreadness or of time passing do you accept that a "misuse" is now accepted and there's no longer any point resisting it?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

At what point of widespreadness or of time passing do you accept that a "misuse" is now accepted and there's no longer any point resisting it?

This isn't a problem for me personally since I know nothing about historical use of language. As such, just using language as correctly as I am capable of is sufficient.

As far as less-as-fewer goes, you are the first person I've ever encountered who defends it as correct rather that merely too trivial to care about. If this becomes a trend, I might be less resistant to its adoption in future.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

There's an interesting article on Language Log I saw a little while ago, that helped clarify my own thinking about it.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that "clarify" is a word I'd use in association with something quite that rambling, but certainly an interesting link, thanks!

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I'd say that the correctness argument is muddied in this particular case, since Tesco's current sign could reasonably be interpreted to intend "10 items or less shopping". "10 items or less items" could be claimed as a cut-and-dried a syntax error (and of course undyingking might still counter-claim that it's correct), but that's not what they actually say.

I dislike the putative new sign more, since "up to 10 items" is actually ambiguous. The old sign, while arguably incorrect, has only one plausible intended meaning (post-modernists who object to this claim may fuck off) and hence is the more acceptable however annoying it may be.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I wonder why they didn't use "No more than 10 items" or sthg like that.

("Eleven... is right out!")

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

"No manier", surely?