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

[waistcoatmark.livejournal.com]

But Tesco's use of less is _wrong_. The fact that many people don't realise or care that it's wrong strikes me as a little silly. If a newspaper argued that "the Tories were likely to win the election because after asking 100 people, the 1% more of them preferred Tory to Labour", then anyone with A level maths would wince at the specious reasoning, but the majority of people wouldn't realise.

If your argument is that it's only wrong because of a subjective and arbitrary set of rules say it is, then you've just placed your stake in a arbitrary position on a sliding scale, ranging from "Anyone who utters or writes a phrase not fully compliant with Strunk and White should be shot" to Humpty Dumpty's "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean".

If you expect me to defend the arbitrary rule about fewer vs less, then I expect you to defend your arbitrary position on the sliding scale and why mixing up fewer/less is OK but disinterested/uniterested is wrong (or if you don't mind that, they're/their/there). :-)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

My position on the scale is that rules which confer variation in meaning or in other aspects of clarity are OK; ones that don't do so are essentially arbitrary.

So eg. "less" and "fewer" don't really differ in meaning; they only differ in the existence of this rule that declares that one should be applied to counts, the other to quantities. We happily apply "more" to both counts and quantities, so clearly it's not necessary to have two different words for its antithesis; just arbitrary convention.

On the other hand, "disinterested" and "uninterested" shouldn't be interchanged because they do have distinct meanings and their blurring may create ambiguity.

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

Hang on! There are a hell of a lot of people who don't even know that they mean different things at all! I thought your stance was that if they are used interchangeably - whether or not they "should" be on grounds of clarity - then they are in fact interchangeable.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and there are a hell of a lot of people who don't know there's a difference between 1,2-dichlorobutane and 1,3-dicholorobutane. What's relevant is any difference understood by those who commonly use the words. Someone who for preference says "none of my business" or "bored of" has abstained.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

It's my position that in usage contexts where they are used interchangeably, then they become de facto interchangeable, yes -- that's just a neutral observation.

But as I said at the top, some "rules" are useful, others are arbitrary -- and here in this comment I'm explaining how I personally determine which is which, and therefore in which cases it's valuable or not to try and resist a drift towards interchangeability.

(As a side note, though, I don't think that useful meanings are likely to ever really "disappear" from the language. If everyone does shift to using disinterested to mean uninterested, then the people who need to distinguish the separate meaning will gradually shift to using something else instead. But in the meantime I'm standing up for disinterested in the way that I wouldn't dream of doing for less / fewer.)