Less, fewer, more?

I've been off racking my brain trying to find an answer to this question (and since I had never written that verb before, I first had to look it up to make sure it's not "wrack"):

I don't know of any language that has separate words for "more beef" and "more cows." Chinese, at least, is consistent and also does not have separate words for "less beef" and "fewer cows." That lack of confusion implies that we're just being old fussbudgets and when the distinction is finally lost in English--surely during this century--it won't matter a whit.

Since Chinese gets along just fine without the concept of singular and plural, my Chinese girlfriend used to roll her eyes when we tried to correct her on things like that, and mutter something which I'm sure was Chinese for "What the fuck difference can it possibly make, you stupid foreign ghosts?" She looked down at her plate and said, "These rice are really tasty." Since "mice" is plural and there indeed were multiple grains of rice on her plate of which she had just picked up one with her chopsticks to show me its quality, I just didn't see the point in getting into that one.

The local supermarket chain (Giant) is unique for its signs on the express lane saying "Ten Items or Fewer."

Welcome to our wonderfully inconsistent language. "More" is hardly the only word that has two antonyms. Is the opposite of "old" "young" or "new"? Is the opposite of "before" "after" or "behind"? (As in, "I stand before you.")

The proscription on splitting infinitives is a myth, so get over it. It's left over from the days before English was regarded as a respectable language and all English grammar books were translations of Latin grammar books. Obviously you can't split an infinitive in Latin because it's a single word. Duh?

This is like not ending a sentence with a preposition, another myth from the Latin-grammar era. Try rearranging "Where's that little girl who wanted to be read to?" These are the same books that taught generations of English children how to decline the five cases of nouns: "The boy, of the boy, to the boy, the boy, O boy!"

It must be sweet to have no more pressing problems in your life than halting the evolution of your language.

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What made you choose the 19th century as your standard rather than the 15th or the 12th or the 9th? Does this mean you totally reject the recent improvement in clarity brought about by the 20th-century grammatical innovation of the noun-adjective compound, such as fuel-efficient, cable-ready, user-friendly, computer-literate and labor-intensive? I'm sure your great-grandparents would be pleased to see you campaigning against that upstart neologism.

You give us too much credit for paying attention to trivia!

In case you haven't noticed, "be" is the only verb in our language that even has a subjunctive mode, because it's the only verb in our language that has two different forms of the past tense: was and were. If I thought, if I had, if I loved, if I went... Somehow we're never confused by the indicative mode in all of those verbs. Why do you think failing to use the subjunctive with "be" is going to confuse us?

Do it on my board and you'll be arrested for trolling.

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Some people just don't have enough to worry about! Use of the accusative pronoun as a predicate complement is acceptable vernacular in my country: it's us, it was her, it will be me. I correct it in formal documents I edit, but I don't track down the person who wrote it and yell at them.

Speaking of "them," how do you solve the problem of de-sexing the singular pronoun? That's a whole lot more important issue than a quixotic resurrection of the subjunctive for one single verb.

 

Yes, that's correct. And no, it doesn't matter. We seem to get along just fine with one word for "more," so we should be able to get along just fine without two words for "less." When's the last time you heard the word "fewer" spoken?

 

John, I have absolutely no idea what you're trying to tell us here.

• The definition of "few" as an adjective is: "Not many but more than one."
• The definition of "a few" as a noun is "A small number or amount."

Here is the final word on the issue from Dictionary.com, which is a consensus of the most respected American dictionaries:

Before someone jumps in screaming, "I don't care what the majority of people do, it's still wrong!" may I remind everyone that that would be an oxymoron. English is a democratic language, not an authoritarian one. We have no academy, no government department, not even a tradition of respect for our elders, to define what's "right" and "wrong." "Right" is the way we do it, and "wrong" is any other way.

The majority of English speakers, at the very least, use "less" and "fewer" interchangeably with countable nouns. A growing number, soon to be the majority, prefer "less" in this context. And most importantly, this usage creates no misunderstanding.

So I will probably not allow posts arguing the concept of abstract right and wrong because there's no such thing in English. If you think this usage does indeed cause confusion, then post away.

Our language evolves constantly, quickly and unconsciously. That's what makes it great.

 

I don't speak 23 languages. The only ones in which I can pretend any degree of fluency (6 on my powers-of-three scale: 1000 words) are English, Esperanto, Spanish, Mandarin, Portuguese, German, French and Yiddish. In each of those, there is no distinction between "fewer" of a countable noun and "less" of an abstract noun.

Better: Most authorities agree that there are more than 5,000 languages still in use. Fraggle can carry on some semblance of a conversation in less than one-fourth of one percent of that total.

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This is not easy to use intuitively. A physicist might say, "The majority of the molecules in this solid are not arranged in a crystal structure, causing it to shatter upon impact rather than dividing into fragments." But would a layman say, "The majority of this object is glass"?

"S/he" was the subject of a brief experiment in the USA and has mercifully been forgotten. Its fatal drawback, as you point out, is that it is unpronounceable: the same drawback that caused Prince to give up his stupid little squiggle and go back to being "Prince," especially when we all began pronouncing TAFKAP as a two-syllable acronym. (Did I mention that English is a democratic language and even today's nobility--the stars of the entertainment industry--have no authority over how we speak.) The only way to pronounce s/he is "she or he," and that conflicts with the only grammatically proper expression that has gained any consensus at all: "he or she."

In American legal documents and the more formal public government pronouncements, "he or she" is the awkward--but at least not teeth-gnashing--standard. In vernacular usage, "they/them/their" is clearly gaining traction. Seemingly atrocious consequences, like "Every child should wash their face after eating," merely evoke a smile, and there is no more effective way to gain approval in America than humor.

Another antiquity that has outlived its usefulness. Our dictionaries now allow "either" and "neither" to be used for groups larger than a pair, so "latter" will inevitably follow, and perhaps even "former."

Must I again remind you that neither you nor I have the authority to decide what's "misuse" and what's "proper"? Correctness in English is strictly a matter of consensus. Authorities like universities and national broadcasters have influence, but so do rappers and comedians.

I'm not sure where you live, but perhaps you remember in the 1980s that American newspaper and magazine editors enforced the typographical standard of "Mary Jones' hat" and even "Pedro Gómez' campaign." The rationale was that Jesus' is almost universal and since we're a secular nation we can hardly allow special treatment for him. But the reason was that eliminating all those en-spaces from the text might salvage a couple of column-inches that could be sold as advertising space.

Blessedly, this never caught on and the newwpapers sheepishly went back to the old way. But interestingly, some Americans liked the new way. I had a friend named Bob Jones and asked him how he would like it if I wrote "Bob Jones' project is ahead of schedule." He looked at me in confusion and said, "What's wrong with that?" and then he proceeded to say the sentence out loud, and sure enough, the S that was missing in print was also missing in speech.

He was Afro-American. In AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) final consonants are elided almost as fiercely as in French.

I write and edit for a living, so I can assure you that my standards have evolved to satisfy the demands of the people who pay me, most of whom in the course of my life have been articulate, well-educated government managers.

 

* * * * NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR * * * *

John, you are in WAAAY over your head. It doesn't seem like you even understand this discussion.

If you want to ask a question to help you understand what we're talking about, then please do so POLITELY.

Everyone understands the idea of "a few elephants":

--Wow, the last time I came to this part of Kenya there were lots of elephants here. Now there are only a few.--

Stop trolling!!!

 

Well leave it to the people who invented the Volvo to be totally, impeccably precise. Good for them! IMHO, Swedish is also one of the most euphonious languages to listen to (uncomprehendingly).

Fler sounds like it's a cognate of German vieler, which means "more" in both senses, the comparative of viel, which means both "much" and "many." I can never find an etymological dictionary of any foreign language online, so I don't know whether viel comes from the same root as voll, which would make it cognate with English "full."

When we say "five," it's an abstraction, and it does not automatically mean an integer. 5.000 is also less than 9.000: five pounds is less than nine pounds.

This is "obvious" only to linguists, grammarians, pedants and editors, or people like me who are a bit of all four. There is nothing intrinsic in the meaning of "former" or "latter" that "obviously" limits it to a binary choice rather than a longer list.

I agree that to a question like, "Do you think Isabel, Otto, Suzy or Pedro would be the best choice for this promotion?" no one would answer, "the former." The connection to a word so far back in the sentence is too vague, and they probably would not even say, "the first" because at least one person in the meeting would not remember whether Suzy or Otto came first. But I have heard people say, "the latter" in such cases, and I did not jump up to correct them. Being understood is more important than slavish adherence to the rules of King Arthur's English, and in this case there is absolutely no danger of being misunderstood.

Languages must evolve, like any component of human culture. One important way in which they evolve is to shed rules that no longer serve a purpose but merely make the language more difficult to speak correctly, using cognitive bandwidth that can be more effectively deployed for some more important task. "Between you and I" grates on my ears, but it absolutely does not impair understanding, any more than "lay down over here" or "it's just me."

Dictionary.com, the democratic chronicler of American usage, says:

When good writers start flouting a rule, you can be sure that it has outlived its usefulness and will be linguistic roadkill within a generation or two.

I would be interested to hear your justification for forgiving the extension of the meaning of "alternative" beyond "one of two" but not "neither," which is of similar binary origin. Perhaps you feel a spiritual connection to native Anglo-Saxon words but disdain for Latin interlopers?

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In a language community with no central authority, once again Dictionary.com chronicles reality for us:

When they say "preferred," it means that not everybody uses it that way. You won't find it in writing that has been professionally edited, for example by me. But you will hear it in TV newscasts, and TV news is arguably the most powerful influence on Standard American dialect.

I spent many years suffering from that attitude. "Why do so many people use the language incorrectly?" Then it finally dawned on me, "I don't make the rules, they do! I am witnessing the evolution of language. Rather than grumbling, as a linguist I should be enjoying the show!"

As I have often pointed out, if my former and your current attitude were taken to its logical extreme, we would be struggling to cope with the 21st century using (take your pick):

• The Enlightenment-Era American English of Jefferson
• The Early Modern English of Shakespeare
• The Middle English of Chaucer
• The Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf,
• The Iron Age language of the precivilized Germanic tribes
• The Stone Age language of the original Indo-Europeans
• Or an ancestral language we can't name that came before that, burdened with a paradigm of inflections that would constrain our discourse and a syntactical structure that would make it very difficult to be having this discussion at all.

Evolution of a language does not only mean borrowing foreign words, making up new ones, and developing grammatical constructs such as "fuel-efficient" or "labor-intensive" (a new pattern of compounding which, I assure you, Shakespeare would compliment us for devising). It also means dumping old crap that has outlived its usefulness.

Indeed! That sound you hear is two more hands clapping!