This is cranky linguist Bob.
The lack of count markers is starting to bug me. To wit…
Usage of “fewer” vs. “less”
The prescriptive rule in English is that “fewer” applies to groups of countable objects whereas “less” applies to uncountable masses. I’d say “many dogs” rather than “much dogs” because dogs are countable. Similarly, I’d say “fewer dogs” not “less dogs.” You can say “less water” but not “fewer water”, though you can say “fewer bottles of water” if you’re willing to introduce a partitive.
Usage of “among” vs. “between”
A similar prescriptive rule is that one uses “between” for two things and “among” for more than two. So it’s “between you and me” but “among the three of us”.
Kids these days
I’ve noticed that “fewer” and “among” are being used infrequently these days, at least in spoken language and language written by scientists. This is understandable as languages tend to evolve toward regularity. It’s just that I used to work on count nouns when I was studying natural language semantics and internalized the rules. So now I find it jarring to hear collocations that jumble the mass/count distinction. This must be how Francophones feel when a non-native speaker confuses the gender of a noun. I can’t stop my internal checksum from flashing an error code!
References
- Meriam-Webster. 2024. ‘between’ vs. ‘among’
- Merriam-Webster. 2024. ‘fewer’ vs. ‘less’
- Bob Carpenter. 1994. Distribution, collection, and quantification: A type-logical account of plurality. Laboratory for Computational Linguistics Technical Report. Carnegie Mellon University.
Yes, I’m human
The blog’s asked me so many times when writing this post that I feel I need to share.
Bob:
I’m surprised you take this position, in that I think of you as Mister Descriptivist when it comes to language.
I’m not a prescriptivist by any stretch, but for some reason the very frequent use of “less” instead of “fewer” stands out for me. The same with the overuse of “I’ instead of” me,” which seems to happen a lot because people over-compensate. They know there’s an issue, so they try to force it through and screw up.
So here’s the thing – for the most part people won’t follow the prescriptivist rules unless it “sounds right” to them. So once the “wrong” use is ubiquitous, the “correct” usage won’t “sound right” very much.
It’s like the use of the definite and indefinite article. Most native speakers, if you asked them when which is used, would struggle to be able to tell you the rules, if at all. If you try to flow chart the correct usage, it’s a pretty complicated flow chart. But for the most part native speakers get it right. Even very advanced non-native speakers of English who can effectively communicate very complicated ideas will get often the use of articles wrong.
What’s funny about that is that in the typical sequence of how non-native speakers are taught English, the use of articles will come quite early in the sequence.
Philosophical positions don’t dictate one’s reaction to every situation. There are less descriptivists in foxholes.
Nice!
That’s why I say I’m like a Francophone cringing at an Anglophone’s pronunciation of French. I know language is going to change around me and that if I want to understand language, the object of study is what people say, not some abstract “perfect” form of “competence” grammar like you might get from an old-school theoretical linguist (I say that because I have very little contact with linguists these days).
When I was in the UK, there was one US-ism that really confused the Brits—the distinction between “bring” and “take”. In the U.S., it’s common to hear people say “I’m going to take a cake to the party” and “I’m going to bring a cake to the party.” If you say the former in the UK, people get confused, because they use “take” to mean “take from” and “bring” in the sense of “bring to”. See, https://painintheenglish.com/case/4977
That’s an odd one! I get the potential confusion over “bring”/”take” in the example in your link (girl asks boy – “could you take me home please” which could mean “take me to my home” or “take me to your home”). But (as a Brit living in UK) I can’t imagine anyone getting confused over “I’m going to take a cake to the party” – that’s exactly what we would say if we were going to go to the party with a cake. We’re more likely to say that than “I’m going to bring a cake to the party”.
The one that gets me is the use of “get” when buying something. The Americanism “Can a get a double expresso” has annoyingly completely take over from the “normal” and rather more quaint UK usage of “can I have a double expresso”.
I blame Cheers.
What follows is very descriptive, but:
Doesn’t it depend on who you are addressing? I.e. whether the person you’re speaking to is or will be at the location of the party?
If you’re talking to the host of the party, you would say “I’m going to bring a cake to the party”.
If you’re talking to someone who’s not going to the event, you would say “I’m going to take a cake to the party”.
The edge case for me is when you’re talking to another invitee to the party. I can see the case for either “bring” or “take” here.
yes, I agree – the context is important.
>The Americanism “Can a get a double expresso” has annoyingly completely take over from the “normal” and rather more quaint UK usage of “can I have a double expresso”.
Ah, how I long for the Stone Age version: “May I please have a cup of coffee”
The antonym of “less” is “more”. Don’t you ever say “more dogs”? That is, unless you’re a cat person?
It does seem odd (and if anyone can explain it to me, it’s you) that there’s no rule against “more” for countable objects, when its opposite “less” has such a rule. Indeed, that may be one reason for your observation: people are allowing the “opposites are grammatically identical” rule to take precedence over the counting rule.
John:
Your comment reminds me of Watership Down, in which the rabbits can’t count beyond 4.
I get that “less”/”more” is the pair, but what about “fewer”/?. “Greater”, perhaps? ChatGPT’s response aligns with my understanding, and it’s way better at grammar than I am.
Oxford English Dictionary:
Etymologically, between refers to two (persons, things, locations, etc.). Use referring to two remains frequent, and in some contexts typical. However, already in Old English use had been extended to more than two (in Old English especially of more than two persons; compare e.g. quot. OE at sense A.III.12). This extended use has sometimes been criticized, and among has been considered more correct in such contexts. Nevertheless, in modern standard English between is the usual word for expressing the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually, whereas among expresses a relation to an assemblage or group regarded collectively, cf. e.g. the following examples (in which use of among would sound less natural): ‘the space lying between the three points’, or ‘a treaty between three powers’, or ‘the choice lies between the three candidates in the select list’, or ‘to insert a needle between the closed petals of a flower’.
Thanks—I hadn’t thought of those. I actually went to the OED, but it’s subscription only! Those are all great examples where pragmatics override semantic and syntactic agreement. Prepositions are really tricky in all languages, but these examples highlight that “among” seems to have a sense of among at random, whereas the space and needle example are explicitly spatial and seem to entail some kind of convex closure and it’s not just like throwing in another point among the others.
It really bothers Stannis Baratheon as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyD1asFBH-U
There is a perhaps apocryphal story of a seminar with John Tukey in the audience. The speaker observes that a double negative turns into a positive but that a double positive does not turn into a negative. Tukey raised his hand and sighed, ….yeah, yeah.
Gib:
I’ve heard this story many times in different ways, never attributed to Tukey before. My guess is that it’s such an obvious line that it’s been attributed to just about everybody! But who knows?
The mass count distinction that is most common is the confusion between “number” and “amount.” As in
The number of liters of milk vs. The amount of milk.
But, what about the verb? In the above example, at least in the U.S., the verb is singular because collective nouns are considered singular. In the U.K., however, collective nouns are considered plural. Usually. From
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun
————————————————————————————————-
Collective nouns are most commonly treated as singular (i.e., used with singular verb forms like ‘is’), but usage varies between US and UK English: In US English, it’s standard to always treat collective nouns as singular. In UK English, either way is acceptable, and usage tends to vary depending on the context.
————————————————————————————————-
> are considered plural
is quite different from
> either way is acceptable, and usage tends to vary depending on the context.
(It’s not clear what “above example” the comment refers to either.)
Living in the UK while learning linguistics really messed me up. The example is of “liters of milk”. Usually with a partitive, like “a number of liters of milk”, the result is singular everywhere. The contrast cited in Wikipedia is “a group of dogs is” (singular verb agreement) vs. “a group of dogs are” (plural verb agreement).
In general, collective nouns can be formed by conjunction, for example, “Sally and Mary lifted the piano,” where it’s assumed they work together to do the action. Contrast that with “Sally and Mary sat an exam,” (UK verb!) which would usually be read as them each taking the exam individually. I don’t think anyone treats “Sally and Mary sits an exam,” even in the UK, but then I’m often surprised about what they write, even after living there three years.
> The example is of “liters of milk”. Usually with a partitive, like “a number of liters of milk”, the result is singular everywhere.
The comment I replied to mentioned “the number liters of milk” but not “a number of liters of milk”.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/collective-noun
The collective noun number, when preceded by a, is treated as a plural: A number of solutions were suggested. When preceded by the, it is treated as a singular: The number of solutions offered was astounding.
Paul –
But, what about the verb? In the above example, at least in the U.S., the verb is singular because collective nouns are considered singular. .
It often can depend on what the speaker (or writer) is thinking of.
The team is arguing (in this case with the ref) vs. the team are arguing (in this case with each other).
Team sports does have the potential for linguistic confusion! I would say that “the team are arguing” is simply grammatically incorrect. You would say “the players are arguing amongst themselves” or the teammates are arguing”.
On the other hand in the heat of the moment people say some odd things even if we can usually glean what they mean. The British satirical magazine Private Eye has a “Commentatorballs” section where commentators linguistic mangling is highlighted! This week’s selection has:
etc.
Slightly related, there was a point in time, possibly somewhere around the turn of the century but possibly later, when the description of International teams changed from adjectival to noun. So where it used to be said “The Spanish team is looking strong this year”, it’s now apparently proper to say “The Spain team is looking strong this year”. In the UK anyway.
Chris –
So let’s say that the team members are arguing with one another, and that was what you are trying to convey. Would you say that “The team is arguing” is grammatically correct? If I didn’t know the context, I’d be inclined to ask – “Who is the team arguing with?” (And certainly not “With whom is the team arguing”). Likewise, do you think “The team is arguing with one another” is grammatically correct (as opposed to “The team are arguing with one another.”)?
The distinction between less and fewer is important. Just ask my kids when they get it wrong.
Now get off my lawn.
Hmmm
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28less%2Ffewer%29&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
fewer: https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/?c=coca&q=122463073
less: https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/?c=coca&q=122463071
I looked there myself and didn’t want to bring it up. The stats here do not match my perception about conversation, but that may be because these are n-grams over books, which tend to be better edited to follow conventions than people’s speech.
Distinguishing between number and amount is confusing. It seems to me that the distinction is between the integers Z and the reals R. Fewer applies to Z, and less applies to R. Since Z is a subset of R, the word less can be used with either, such as “ten items or less”.
I love type theory more than the next person (e.g., I wrote a whole book on the topic, plus designed Stan’s type system!), but language doesn’t work the way assignment does in a programming language. Language works by what’s called “agreement” among linguists. If I have a singular noun, I don’t say, “Oh, hang on, I can economize—one element sets are still sets, so I can treat the proper noun “Bob” as plural and say, “Bob write this blog post.” Now language might drift that way in the future, but for now, that’s confusing as you have a mismatch in number. Same with count/mass. Mass nouns can also apply to things that are too numerous to count with small numbers, like “spaghetti,” which is technically plural, but conventionally used like a mass noun (e.g., we don’t say “several spaghetti, please,” we say “more spaghetti, please”).
If you have to choose between “between” and “among”
Just remember the first line of this little song
Remember which word is used there twice to refer to two things and you can move along
And if you use “among” to refer to more than two things you’ll likely be less wrong
I keep this one bookmarked for reference: https://ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com/2022/12/within-among-or-between.html Helpful for examples in ecology and evolutionary biology.
If a grammar dictionary sounds like anything you’re interested in, I would heartily recommend Garner’s modern american usage, now in its 5th edition. I’ve found it really helpful when writing. It also tracks how usage has changed over time among many other things.
I also have used Garner (although my copy of it seems to have disappeared).
But it’s not without it’s critics.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25436
Examples include:
“And anyway, Erin Brenner, editor of Copyediting newsletter, found that Garner’s 4th is not much better than the 3rd. He may be a little more transparent about his methodology now, but if the 4th is anything like the 3rd, then it’s safe to say that he freely mixes fact and opinion and ignores facts when they’re inconvenient.”
And the seriously problematic (the nicest words I could find):
“Garner: I find Bernie Sanders’s dialect to be very unpleasant to listen to. I could also understand why so many people in New England considered George W. Bush to be unlistenable, because he overdid the Texas twang. And in fact even to a Texan — it made this Texan cringe. But Bernie Sanders is very difficult to listen to because one doesn’t expect an educated American to have that kind of accent.”
FWIW, when I was a working translator I found Microsofts style manual useful and sensible, Chicago unusable, and a book by a copyeditor with cat footprints all over the cover and inside pages also quite useful/sensible. None of these have survived post-retirement bookshelf reorganizations.
FWIW, ranking on prescriptivists is cheap entertainment, since they get so much basic stuff wrong. But if you enjoy shooting fish in a barrel:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5&paged=4
Or google “language log prescriptivist poppycock”
I think everyone is misunderstanding my post. I know language changes. I was a linguist for 20+ years and not an absurd theorist. I’m not a prescriptivist by any stretch of the imagination. I’m just saying that I find dropping these distinctions jarring as a listener. End of story. Maybe I shouldn’t have titled the post “in defense of”?
Style manuals, on the other hands, are the definition of prescriptive! I have issues with almost all of them, though I haven’t seen your book with cat prints on it. My copy-editor at Cambridge University Press was a genius—she found math errors spread across 50 pages, not to mention a bajillion language inconsistencies. And it wasn’t all prescriptive—that was MIT for my second book, who wouldn’t let me use authorial “we” because I was a single author and literally changed everything to first person during typesetting! MIT also didn’t like that I was trained to use commas in the UK.
I’m reading Says Who? by Dr. Anne Curzan, a wonderful book on linguistics, and happened today to read chapter 12, “counting less/fewer things.” She points out exceptions to the rule of countability: measures of time, amount, or distance and singular nouns. Would you say the store is fewer than one mile away?
The next chapter is on singular, and the one following that explores between/among, so you might find it quite interesting!
The sentence ‘the journey is three miles fewer than what it once was’ is actually a correct one, grammatically and lingustically. But somewhere along the line people drop [than what it once was] and more formal or proper finishing of sentences, coupled with the confusion or conflation of quantities versus length of time.
Now, why would the journey be three miles fewer than what it once was? Well, let’s presume that part of a cliff-face crumbled and fell into the sea and that the destination point was moved or something. Because of, oh, let’s say, angry penguins launching themselves against a cliff-edge.
This statement would be in response to a question such as: ‘So how long is the journey now?’ And the modern person responding, or those who arent quite so literate, will conflate quantity with the length of time the journey now takes instead. Trying to answer two different questions or perhaps getting confused about what is being asked entirely.
It really is as a result of English not being a first or native language, and that is rather dire, because I find that most native British people and Englanders are very nearly not native speakers of their own language.
Something has happened to grammatical and linguistic sense in English even amongst the English. These kinds of mistakes usually only happen if English isn’t your first language.
Another one that irritates and infuriates me is in the sentence ‘What is the world like outside the forest?’
Americans say and write ‘How’ instead. Once again, I think this as a by-product of the working and middle classes speaking their language so poorly over time, but that itself I do fear comes from mal-education and loss of linguistical sense in a populace.
David:
To me, the phrase, “The journey is three miles fewer,” sounds weird and is also logically incorrect, because the length of a journey—whether measured in distance or time—is continuous, not integer-valued. Since it sounds pedantic and also makes no sense to me, I would never say it.
I also don’t think I’d say “three fewer ounce of chocolate” in a recipe, but that’s a tougher call, because “three less ounces” doesn’t sound right either. They both kind of sound wrong! Would I say, “two and a quarter fewer ounces” or “two and a quarter less ounces”? I’m not sure. Sometimes there’s no clean way to say something—which I guess makes sense, given the wide variety of things we try to say and the open-endedness of the rules.
“because “three less ounces” doesn’t sound right either.”
You need “three ounces less chocolate”, I’d think. (Although lots of folks would consider using less chocolate always a bad idea.)
Agreed that “The journey is three miles fewer,” is completely dizzy, unacceptable, and bad.
So something like “The trip was three miles shorter than expected” is what’s needed.
Note that what I’m doing is rewriting from scratch. These problems appear because less/fewer only covers a few cases, not all cases, and people are trying to make them do things neither can do. That is, I disagree with your “Sometimes there’s no clean way to say something”; there’s pretty much always a good way to say something, it’s just that it may take some effort and/or inventivenesss to come up with it.
David:
Good point! Thanks for explaining.
All of those things are measures of continuous quantities. “Two miles,” even though it has a count determiner “Two”, is a continuous measure of distance that could’ve been “2.1379 miles” if the speaker was being more precise. Same for “three ounces”.
Andrew—the point is that language changes. I’m just lamenting that part of it’s changing out from under me and it sounds jarring every time I hear it.
David—some things are easier or harder to say depending on how a language has carved up the world into nouns and verbs. As a simple example jut from English, it’s much easier to describe a primary color than something that’s a bit off. I might say “vermillion” to describe a color accurately in English, but there’s a non-negligible chance the hearer doesn’t know the word. Then I have to resort to a description interpolating from colors they do know.
It’s not that something can’t be said in language X, it’s that it can often be said much more economically in language Y.
surely appropriate answers to the question: “So how long is the journey now?” are something like:
“The journey is three miles shorter than it used to be” or maybe “The journey is 30 minutes shorter than it used to be” depending on how the responder perceives the context. The point is that one doesn’t need to try to shoehorn the “less/fewer” dichotomy into contexts where it isn’t required.
In the UK the “less/fewer” issue got a wide public airing some years ago in the context of supermarket checkouts where fast checkout aisles were labeled something like:
“five items or less” when it should be, of course “five items or fewer”
btw, re “I find that most native British people and Englanders are very nearly not native speakers of their own language” (which I agree with – the Dutch are better English speakers than the Brits), why are you seperating out “native British people” and “Englanders”?! Aren’t Englanders a subset of native British people or are you making a subtle distinction?
In the U.S. it has been a slightly different controversy:
“five items or less” when it should be, of course, “the number of items in my basket or less”
Oops, should be “the next chapter is on singular data” which many here would probably find contentious
I am with Bob. I find such changes in usage grating. I worry that I will have a medical emergency at some point in my life induced by hearing the word epicenter used when the proper word is center one too many times.
Doh. Should be epicenter used . . . word is center