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

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

Of course there are people who believe that there's only one correct version of English, and that any variation on that, be it dialect, argot or whatever, is essentially wrong

There are people like that, it's true, but I think that we would actually find common ground in believing that they are kidding themselves. The thing is, dialects and argots are suitable to their circumstances; not to formal usage, which will be received by people outside that context. I consider that a sign used by a national supermarket in stores across the country to be formal, and therefore one that should be beholden to formally accepted standards of grammar and spelling.

Obviously there are times when words come into the 'core' language from the fringes as they do from other languages, but just because that is the case, it doesn't mean that no one should point out when something is wrong by the current standard, even if a lot of people don't realise it is wrong. I might even go as far as to say that the more people there are who don't recognise the distinction, the more reason there is to draw attention to it!