EDIT: you guys have dug up some truly horrible pisstakes :D Thank you for those.
To the serious folk - relax a little. This is Mildly Infuriating, not I'm dying if this doesn't stop. As a non-native speaker I was taught a certain way to use the language. The rules were not written down by me, nor the teachers - it was done by the native folk. Peace!
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I couldn’t care fewer.
@cdf12345 if you really want to infuriate people that should be “I could care fewer.”
Bastard stole my line
*you’re
[malix@derp ~]$ fewer .bashrc bash: fewer: command not found:(
$alias fewer = ‘less’
What would
" $ touch fewer
$ fewer .bashrc " Do?basically nothing/same “command not found”.
“fewer” doesn’t have execute rights, nor does the next command use the fewer in current directory. But, taking all that into account and “doing it right…ish”:
$ touch fewer $ chmod +x fewer $ ./fewer .bashrc #it outputs nothing, it's an empty script
The right answer is to use bat
My pet peeve is people using
lesswhen they should be usingmoreNah, I like my VIM keys
The fewer-versus-less argument is the result of Robert Baker writing down his preferred style, which was then taken as gospel. Less and fewer have been used interchangeably for hundreds of years.
The distinction is as important as me writing down that I think every last letter in a sentence should be a capital letter for symmetry.
You could at least practice what you preacH.
I THOUGHT HE MEANT EVERY LAST LETTER…AS IN, EVERY ONE.
I coulD! But then I’d risk mildly infuriating peoplE. Wouldn’t want thaT!
You all are going to give me Homestuck flashbacks.
Isn’t every rule just a preference of someone influential enough to make it into a rule?
Common rules for spelling make sense (though English really needs to stop using 16th century spelling because it stopped making sense ages ago), but for things like word use, prescribing what words to use is plain snobbery. A lot of it comes from “this is how I speak so this is how you must speak” and “this is how Latin and Greek do it, Latin and Greek are Very Cool Languages, so we must do it too”. “Never end your sentence in a proposition”, “use fewer instead of less”, it’s all bullshit.
Spelling is just a way to make exchanging text easier, but nobody gets to decide what words you and your community use. Some English dialects still use (forms of) “thou” even though most English speakers have switched to the formal “you” (compare French tu/vous, German du/sie) and that’s just as valid as any other dialect. Language is malleable and while having a common tongue is useful, anyone trying to rule over the language you speak with your peers is just power tripping. This also applies to AAVE, by the way.
Mans needa yeet the whack ass non-Gucci words bruh
No.
There’s two types of grammar rules. There’s the real grammar rules, which you intuitively learn as a kid and don’t have to be explicitly taught.
For example, any native English speaker can tell you that there’s something off about “the iron great purple old big ball” and that it should really be “the great big old purple iron ball”, even though many aren’t even aware that English has an adjective precedence rule.
Then there’s the fake rules like “ain’t ain’t a real word”, ‘don’t split infinitives’ or “no double negatives”. Those ones are trumped up preferences, often with a classist or racist origin.
The trouble with double negatives in I think Germanic languages in general is that they’re possibly ambiguous, relying on either tone and context or complex grammar to disambiguate whether you mean to negate a negative or mean to pile them up. Also negating negatives should be avoided if you can say things straight-up, there has to be plenty of reason to choose “Don’t not go there” over “Do go there”.
But that’s all style. It has also been said that you should describe how things are, not how they aren’t, and then Douglas Adams comes along and describes a space ship as “hanging in the air in the way that bricks don’t” which is pure brilliance (because it says, in negative space, something else about what that ship is: Eerie to the onlookers). Rules are there so you stop and think before you break them. If you want to write like Douglas Adams just make sure that you always wait until the traffic light turns yellow.
One important thing to realize is that different dialects of English have slightly different grammars.
One place where different dialects differ is around negation. Some dialects, like Appalachian English or West Texas English, exhibit ‘negative concord’, where parts of a sentence must agree in negation. For example, “Nobody ain’t doin’ nothing’ wrong”.
One of the most important thing to understanding a sentence is to figure out the dialect of its speaker. You’ll also notice that with sentences with ambiguous terminology like “he ate biscuits” - were they cookies, or something that looked like a scone? Rules are always contextual, based on the variety of the language being spoken.
How would Appalachian English say “Don’t not go there”? Even languages that only use negative concord have constructions to do double negatives, in Russian that’s done like “This is not unprovable” vs. “This is provable”, with “un-” (“без- / бес-”) being a very productive modifier. Sometimes the double negation becomes so common that it becomes part of the word, say небезопасный, “nonundangerous”.
I would expect, in practice, something like “Don’t stay away from there” but as we’re talking about a dialect continuum it doesn’t sound terribly unlikely for people to simply switch grammar (not necessarily phonetics or lexicon) to a dialect in which there’s no negative concord. And that, mostly, is what I mean by “ambiguous”.
“Nobody ain’t doin’ nothing’ wrong”.
I’ve always heard it more as “ain’t nobody doin’ nothing wrong”
…“Don’t not go there” over “Do go there”…
So many tour guides for cities say things like “do not skip going to” or similar. It’s just a linguistic choice.
It certainly sounds like you have a strong preference how to split preferences into two groups. ;)
@TheEntity some are, like the Prepositions rule, which was invented in the 19th century by some idiots who wished English was more like Latin.
Some are just people making observations about what everyone habitually already does, like Adjectival Order (e.g big brown dog not brown big dog).
Native speakers never have to be taught that rule because it just “feels right” since it’s how our societies talk.
I’ve never heard of robert baker, but the less/fewer “rule” makes sense and just “sounds” more correct intuitively. Maybe just bias, having been tainted by this “rule”
You know, this is actually a hot take and I could get behind iT.
I had literally never heard anyone complain about this until the Game of Thrones scene with Stannis Baratheon. Maybe grammar nerds cared before that but I don’t think most normal people cared.
I also need to think it through every time I use it, because in my native language there is only 1 word for both. (Hungarian)
-bash: fewer: command not found$ alias fewer=less $ which fewer fewer: aliased to less
Your post is fewer than 60 minutes old.
Arguably, that is correct: “minute” is a countable noun, so should take “fewer” as a modifier.
Yeah it is grammatically correct but most people would say “less than 5 minutes ago” or “less than 50 seconds”, instead of using “fewer than”.
Minutes may be countable but time itself isn’t, I’d say. Generally applies to units: You can certainly count litres but it’s still “less than five litres”, at least when talking about a volume say left in a tank as opposed to things that come in individual 1l containers. The space between that (e.g. 500ml or 1.5l containers) is fuzzy.
Yeah the inconsistencies are interesting.
Is it because of the “than”? Do we just not like saying “fewer than”? Because it wouldn’t offend my ear to hear “we need less than 5 chairs”, but “we need less chairs” is outrageous to me, (for less than however many chairs it takes for them to become dequantized) [I did it again there, did you notice?]
Or maybe it’s to do with the minutes being a quantization of something continuous, whereas usually we deal with the transition the other way.
“couches vs. furniture” couches are discrete, furniture is discrete things as a collective.
“time vs minutes” time is continuous, minutes are a quantization of it. That is a difference compared to couches/ furniture. How do we talk about other quantizations of continuous?
Distance: how far is it? Less than 5 miles. Maybe it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that we talk about miles but inherently understand that distance isn’t countable.
Oops that used “than” again. Uhhh… “the battery in my electric car is degraded so I get 10 less miles per charge”. Hmm I’m not sure if that sounds right…
It might have to do with grouping. Use less for one lump, use fewer for individual count.
Or maybe it’s to do with the minutes being a quantization of something continuous, whereas usually we deal with the transition the other way.
I think this is correct.
Suppose she has a 4-gallon bucket, 3/4 filled. She has “less than 4 gallons.”
Contrast with a milk crate, which normally holds 4 jugs of milk, but it, too is only 3/4 filled. Same liquid volume of milk but now I would say that she has “fewer than 4 gallons”, because the milk now comes in discrete units.
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I couldn’t give fewer of a shit
I’m also a non-native speaker and I’ve also been taught to speak a certain way (“you and I are going” but “he saw you and me”; don’t split infinitives; don’t end sentences with prepositions, etc.), but then I read Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct and - even more relevant here - The Sense of Style. We’ve been taught to use language a certain way, but our teachers were following the prescriptivist school of thought. You say these rules were written by native folk, but it’s often (if not usually) the native folk that say less when they “should” be saying fewer.
I know you said it’s only mildly infuriating to you, but if proper use of language is something dear to your heart (as it is to mine) - I really recommend the above books as I think this is something not worth to get even mildly infuriated about. The border between less and fewer is fuzzier than you think and - in the words of Pinker - once you really master the distinction - that’s one fewer thing for you to worry about.
Edit: typo
haha! amazing write up and informative view on language and it’s evolution
I have used less several times when I should have used more…
when people write should of instead of should have
Shoulda woulda coulda
Bash says that the
fewercommand can’t be found…lessismore, though!
I’ve corrected people a few times on this, but then I looked it up, and from what I understand, since language is defined by usage, saying “less” when technically it should be “fewer” is still generally correct. It still sounds alright to me, though oddly the reverse (using “fewer” when it should be “less”) sounds fewer (aka less) correct to me.
I’m a linguist and this is the answer. The correct usage is however people use it, not how a book editor, dictionary, or your third grade teacher think it should be used.
Example: “there’s” for both plural and singular rather than “there are” versus “there’s/there is”.
however people use it,
The way this is phrased, it sounds like you can’t be wrong. So I would just clarifying that if both the speaker and audience agree on the intent of the speaker, it’s correct.
There is the concept of an ideolect and you can very easily argue that something is correct as long as some native speaker thinks so…
joor rite spelin is stoopit an sos punktution. Pandas be damned.
The correct usage is however people use it
If people use “literally” figuratively, does that mean that they’re evolving the language? Or are they just idiots?
Literally is now even officially a contranym. Additionally in the process of making the decision to make it a contranym, they pointed to a number of examples of famous English authors using it as in the way these “idiots” use it.
Language evolves.
What is the line for language evolution ?
If I start calling dogs “cats” tomorrow, am I wrong? Or have I just taken the first steps towards making my mark on the English language?
If I start calling dogs “cats” tomorrow, am I wrong?
If your audience knows what you mean? No. If your audience has no idea what you mean? Yes.
Or have I just taken the first steps towards making my mark on the English language?
If it becomes a norm? Yes.
But what does this have to do with the price of tea in China? We were talking about literally, and how it is literally (the way you mean it) a contranym now. Using it to only mean figuratively (the way you want it to be used), especially when it had been used that way for a long time and even has a history of using is no longer “idiotic” it’s just a common usage of the term. It mildly irks me too, however, I can’t remember the last time I was actually confused by the intent of the speaker.
Well, my personal options on
literallyare that it is not being used to meanfiguratively, it is being used in a figurative manner for weight and effect. The same way thatyeahandrightare both positive/agreement words, but can be used in a figurative manner to mean the opposite. If someone says “they turned the frogs gay!” And someone responds “riiiiiiiiiight…”,rightstill means “that statement is correct” but it was used with an inflection that implies the opposite. That doesn’t mean the dictionary definition ofrightnow needs to be updated to fall in line with 21st century sarcastic smart ass linguistics.So, I dont actually think the definition of
literallyhas changed, and I disagree with any dictionary that says it has and now needs to include an additional definition of the word that means the opposite.The reason I was asking is because you, like me, seem to care about this more than the average person. So I was curious of your thought on the matter in hopes that I might gain some additional insight on the matter that I didn’t have before.
It mildly irks me too, however, I can’t remember the last time I was actually confused by the intent of the speaker.
That’s the same feeling I would have if someone told me a story where they were “habilitated by fear” instead of “debilitated by fear”. I know what they mean. That doesn’t mean the word they used means the same thing though.
The language is evolving. “Literally” now means “literally” and also "very much so.
I have worked as a book editor, and so my instinct is often to be corrective/prescriptive. The linguist side of me usually wins out, though.
Sorry, I’ll do that fewer.
bash: fewer: command not found
I’m setting up an alias right now.
Make sure the OP provides you with a binary first
People thinking the English language is static and has to follow rules.
This Is English, my friend. The top dog of non-proscriptive languages where meanings change over time and reflect current usage.
Want to force everyone to follow the rules?
Start speaking French.
It is also a tool to allow common understanding between a diverse group of people. I’m not saying that less/fewer is an important rule. However ‘anything goes’ is going to have an impact on people’s understanding of bothe you and your message
I’m not saying anything goes either but if people around you use less and fewer interchangeably, there is no communication breakdown at all.
Do you know the correct times to use practice vs practise?
Noun vs verb? That’s the case with licence vs license, at least.
They’re both license in American English.
Edit: Same for practice.
I’ve tried more instead of less, I will have to try fewer and see how it works, which repo is fewer on?
