Matthew Yglesias has some uncharms, among them an apparent disdain for spel-checking, let along proofreading, and he put up a post yesterday which I would like to believe was just flame-bait for his commenters but annoys me nonetheless: he wants to do away with the distinction between less and fewer. Ugh.
I am not an absolutist maniac on this (e.g., I could make a case either way for saying "it's {less|fewer} than fifty miles from here"), but I do usually prefer that fewer be used when we're talking about discrete objects, particularly a small number of them. I was delighted when I moved to Rochacha and saw that Wegman's, my new neighborhood grocery store, had signs up in the express lanes saying "10 items or fewer." So, I was happy to see that many of Matt's commenters handed him his ass. I particularly liked this one by johnsondelegate:
A world with less options is a world with fewer freedom.
Other goodness from the comments includes links to Language Log's thoughts on the matter and an awesome (both old and new meanings) essay on usage in general by David Foster Wallace. This is alone worth reading for the speech he said he would give to his black students about Standard Written English, particularly since it could be given to people of any color.
2 comments:
Thermopylae.
The less the comments, the less the much.
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