Linguists?
Sep. 5th, 2008 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
(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.)
"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".
(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.)
Re: Points granted but
Date: 2008-09-05 04:16 pm (UTC)Recognition is vital. The OED is full of obsolete words poets would no longer choose to use because readers without the OED couldn't understand their meaning.
Re: Points granted but
Date: 2008-09-05 04:26 pm (UTC)Re: Points granted but
Date: 2008-09-08 11:08 pm (UTC)Even authors - I've given up on R Scott Bakker despite liking the plot of his first novel and the rest of the trilogy being strongly recommended to me because (along with many other similar cases) he feels the need to use the word "marmoreal" where "marble" would have done fine.
Re: Points granted but
Date: 2008-09-09 07:42 am (UTC)