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David Foster Wallace wrote an essay on usage guides, including Garner’s, for Harper’s Magazine in 2001. It was titled “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.” Still worth reading if you enjoy—or at least can tolerate—Wallace’s own writing style:
https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...
I've noticed the "less" vs "fewer" issue a lot more in the last few years. I feel like we're losing that battle. I will continue to (kindly!) remind people of the difference, though. I can't help it.
Nitpicking is unkind. Saying that you're kind about nitpicking doesn't make you kind. If you want to be kind, I recommend not nitpicking.
Language is driven by users with skin in the game, not nitpickers with dictionaries. Word use and meaning will shift naturally over time. If I say less and, given the context, you understand it to mean few, then the mission was accomplished, the mission being communication. That you understood me is an example of word use/meaning shift in action. It happens.
Ok, my attempt at self deprecating humor didn't land. I don't actually correct anyone on this, I only make hacker news comments about it. But it won't stop standing out to me.
> not nitpickers with dictionaries.
And indeed, the writers of those dictionaries would be against the prescriptivist nitpicking, too.
Wasn't this rule made up by someone in the 18th century because he thought it sounded better [1]? Therefore, it's not even more correct to say fewer rather than less. The only reason to care about it is to stop people trying to correct your language usage.
[1] e.g. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/495/less-vs-fewe...
Never tried to claim it wasn't pedantic of me! Just one of those things that sticks, because it was taught to me that way.
It's almost like it's an unimportant distinction for normal speech and that the spoken language is moving on, as it inevitably does.
100% understand that. It's just something that's stuck with me for some reason.
Fair enough:)
It's also okay to have opinions about language of course. I just often see people confidently stating, that they're speak the right way, and those others (from that other city, country, those young people, those poor people, those black people, etc.) speak the wrong way. And it often boils down to either ignorance about how languages actual work and evolve, or just elitism/classism (or worse).
And as somebody who cares a lot about languages, this just rubs me the wrong way, and I see it so often. Hence my previous response, pardon the snark:)
It'd be one less thing to worry about ;)
At this point, the battle is over. Any remaining resistance in the "fewer" camp had a stake driven through its heart when Lin-Manuel Miranda used "That's one less thing to worry about" in one of the most popular musicals in a decade.
As Shakespeare showed, when you're a playwright, you can change the language.
Except that this was a common idiom long before Miranda used it.
Yes of course. The difference is that he has establishment clout. Anyone who is being called to task for "misusing English" can now just quote someone who's use of English grossed $807 million.
I've always thought that might be an interesting feature to have in an esoteric programming language - for floats you must use the 'less than' comparison, but for integers use the 'fewer than' comparison.
I like this better than SML/NJ's 'andalso' and 'orelse' because they'd already used 'and' and 'or' for bitwise logic computations and the language disallows function overloading.
i'm doing good thinking about it less times
I'm not a native English speaker. I didn't get what is wrong with the sentence
> “States were further required to limit soot from power plants, cars and other sources to 2.5 microns, or 28 times smaller than [who can be sure what this means?] the width of a human hair.”
that is quoted in the text. Should they have said "soot particles"? Or is it something else? And why can't we be sure what "28 times smaller than" means?
"28 times smaller than" (and the like) is one of my bugbears. I think it means "1/28th of the size", but then you get constructions like "three times smaller than" instead of the clearer and more obvious "one third the size of". Trying to think too hard about what it means to be "N times smaller than" becomes pretty confusing, I think.
In a newspaper, I'd rather see something like "4% of the width of a human hair", which is surely accurate enough given the variability of hair widths and clearer too.
Steve Mould, the YouTuber, has a fun takedown of the phrase "6 times colder than", and how in every reasonable interpretation it is completely meaningless.
I found the section in the book that explains it:
>X Times less than. Brand Y may cost twice as much as Brand X, but that doesn’t mean Brand X is twice as cheap as Brand Y. Farburg may be two times as far away as Nearville, but that doesn’t mean Nearville is two times closer than Farburg. Big Dog may be twice the size of Little Dog, but that doesn’t mean Little Dog is two times smaller than Big Dog.
>One time is 100% of the cost, distance, size, or any other measure. If you take away “one time” something, you’ve taken away all there is. If you walk toward me and cover all the distance, you can’t get any closer—you can’t be twice as close as you were before. If the price is discounted one time or 100%, the item is free. Two times cheaper, if it means anything, might imply that the store will pay you the full price of Brand Y if you will take Brand X home with you. That mangles the meaning of cost, and it surely isn’t what the writer means.
Personally, I can see what the author is going for but I disagree that it implies the store will pay you.
TLDR their approach:
> In Garner’s view, the best course is to “follow idiom and usage” but “otherwise apply logic.” Such advice circumvents the descriptivism-prescriptivism binary often invoked in discussions of grammar. Garner is saying, essentially, be descriptivist when you can and prescriptivist when you can’t.
Prescriptivist in the streets, descriptivist in the sheets!
> “hone in” for “home in.”
That's for people that have never used a straight razor.
You can pull Strunk's from my cold, dead hands.
Perhaps one of the biggest blights on English writing instruction that that book isn't just ignored. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/50years.pdf
Yeah I'm always shocked at how frequently it's used by my colleagues. I will say it is used in a lot of non-writing disciplines, but I remember my first English class putting that thing in my hands and ugh.
It's part of a broader issue in writing instruction that mistakes etiquette for style.
I've read it before. It's a bit of a rant and is also probably a bit unfair--but I'm not sure it's wrong either.
Ironically, it was ignored by the authors in much of their writing, both in "Elements" and other works.
Yes, if they'd followed their own suggestions their writing would not be as well loved as it is.
Amusingly, the original PEP-8 had "When writing English, Strunk and White apply" rather than "applies" (so treating "Strunk & White" as a plural). That subsequently corrected to "When writing English, follow Strunk and White".
Linguists universally make fun of S&W.
S&W is a series of misinformed and inconsistent stylistic preferences that mediocre English majors use to status signal to other mediocre English majors.
The point is that around you and Strunk, the language keeps evolving.
It’s not that good.