[Gllug] ``Confidential`` .sigs

[Nix]

On Sun, 05 Dec 2004, John Winters stated:
> On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 11:55, Nix wrote:
>> `Less' and `fewer' are synonyms in that context,
> 
> Not quite.  "Less" refers to things which you can't count - porridge,
> sewage, education etc.  "Fewer" is for things that you can count, like
> bananas, supermarkets or items.  It's odd that no-one ever makes this
> mistake the other way around.

I think it's been bleached somewhat, so that it's now more complex
than that. Consider:

You have less porridge than me
??You have fewer porridge than me

??You have less chips than me
You have fewer chips than me

These are straight comparisons, and it's clear that `less' is for mass
nouns and `fewer' for countable: the alternatives just don't work.


But now we try the supermarket variant:

Less than 10 items only
Fewer than 10 items only

Neither of these sound at all wrong, to my ear at least --- and if you
have to rely on memorized rules to work out if something is
ungrammatical, the chances are that it *isn't* ungrammatical, at least
not in your personal dialect of English ;)


Notably, this related case (with a somewhat differently-structured
sentence) brings back the wrongness:

??Enter only if you have less items than Bill
Enter only if you have fewer items than Bill

In *that* case, the former sounds wrong, to me at least.


(But I've not tried to find out frequencies of use, so this may just be
a personal grammatical foible.)

>> except that `fewer' is
>> clumsier without rephrasing as the slightly bizarre `Fewer than 11
>> items',
> 
> There's nothing clumsy about "10 items or fewer".

It feels archaic to me.

> Of course you can always cut the Gordian knot as Waitrose does and say,
> "1 basket only".

That's probably wisest. :)

-- 
`The sword we forged has turned upon us
 Only now, at the end of all things do we see
 The lamp-bearer dies; only the lamp burns on.'
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