fewer vs less

Either would be acceptable

Less bacon, fewer pigs.

McTag wrote:

Less bacon, fewer pigs.

How very sad

Fewer is used with objects that can be counted one-by-one. Less is used with qualities or quantities that cannot be individually counted. Fewer slices is the only correct option. Fewer and less are not optionally interchangeable.

M-W:

Usage Discussion of LESS

The traditional view is that less applies to matters of degree, value, or amount and modifies collective nouns, mass nouns, or nouns denoting an abstract whole while fewer applies to matters of number and modifies plural nouns. Less has been used to modify plural nouns since the days of King Alfred and the usage, though roundly decried, appears to be increasing. Less is more likely than fewer to modify plural nouns when distances, sums of money, and a few fixed phrases are involved <less than 100 miles> <an investment of less than $2000> <in 25 words or less> and as likely as fewer to modify periods of time <in less (or fewer) than four hours>.


http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/less

another silly prescription

January 04, 2007

LESS THAN THREE YEARS: A POLICY REVISION

As you may know, we language writers often have to hold down two or more jobs in order to maintain the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed. I am Senior Contributing Editor here at the great Language Log corporation, but I also moonlight as a Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And I have to participate in the governance of the university just like any other professor. In fact I currently chair a committee of the Academic Senate. And in that capacity I recently received a copy-edited proposed revision of promotion regulations in the Academic Personnel Manual, sent to me for comment by the University Committee on Academic Personnel (UCAP), in which I read the following:

Advancement to Step VI usually will not occur after [less] fewer than three years of service at Step V . . .

The change proposed (along with two other such alterations plus some more substantive changes; old wording in [strikeout] brackets, new in underlined boldface) is an implementation of an old, old prescriptivist rule that insists less than N X's is ungrammatical if you can count X's. This rule is bogus. And, I thought, they shouldn't ask professors of linguistics to chair committees if they don't want linguists' opinions. So I couldn't resist writing the following paragraphs as the opening of my committee's letter of comments:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004005.html

November 15, 2006

IF IT WAS GOOD ENOUGH FOR KING ALFRED THE GREAT...
Do you own a copy of Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage? If not, go immediately to your favorite bookseller and buy one. Believe me, it'll be the best $13.22 (or even $16.95, if you pay list price) that you've spent in a while. Geoff Pullum recommended it last year ("Don't put up with usage abuse", 1/15/2005), in response to a reader's question about what references or authorities to trust with respect to style and usage. Geoff used blurb-worthy phrases like "the best usage book I know of" and "this book ... is utterly wonderful", and I agree with him.

Why am I plugging this book today? Because it provides a perfect answer to a note from a reader about the use of less and fewer.

Matt Cockerill send in a link to an article in the Guardian (John Mullan, "M&S: the pedant's store", 10/6/2006). Apparently a customer complained about apostrophe placement ("I do not care to dress my child in a top containing a glaring grammatical giraffe gaffe"), and after an appeal to their "childrenswear technologist", M&S withdrew the offending item from their stores, apologized, and sent a refund. Matt focused on the article's passing mention of an earlier M&S capitulation to customers' grammatical prejudices:

M&S, of course, likes to project a classy image and this confession of grievous fault rather neatly confirms it as the favoured shop of those with high standards, in grammar as in everything else. A few years ago it changed its "6 items or less" checkout signs for replacement signs declaring, more correctly, "6 items or fewer", reportedly after customers had grumbled.

Matt observed that this "crops up as a standard example of the shoddy grammar of our modern age in newspaper articles here all the time", and registered a counter-grumble:

... the weird thing is, I've never once seen anyone point out that there's nothing grammatically wrong with '5 items or less', and in fact it's much more natural and less stilted sounding than '5 items or fewer'.

The key, as far as I'm concerned, is to realize that it's quite valid to think of '5 items or less' to imply an ellipsis:
"5 items or less... [than that amount of shopping]"

and in that it's no different from any number of standard grammatical usages which make use of ellipsis.

I'm also always tempted to ask whether they would replace the sign outside a kids playground to indicate that it may be used only by children who are "5 years old or fewer"...

Matt's grammatical instincts are exactly right. He's also correct in observing that with ages -- and in certain other cases of countables as well, which MWCDEU summarizes as "distances, sums of money, units of time, and statistical enumerations" -- less is generally preferred to fewer. And Matt's observation about a possible construal of "5 items or less" also seem valid to me, although I think it's a secondary point. The primary point is that the now-standard pedantry about less/fewer is in fact one of the many false "rules" that have recently precipitated out of the over-saturated solution of linguistic ignorance where most usage advice is brewed.

But not the usage advice at MWCDEU. This is the start of its entry on less/fewer:

Here is the rule as it is usually encountered: fewer refers to number among things that are counted, and less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured. This rule is simple enough and easy enough to follow. It has only one fault -- it is not accurate for all usage. If we were to write the rule from the observation of actual usage, it would be the same for fewer: fewer does refer to number among things that are counted. However, it would be different for less: less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted. Our amended rule describes the actual usage of the past thousand years or so.

As far as we have been able to discover, the received rule originated in 1770 as a comment on less:

This Word is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I shoudl think Fewer would do better. No Fewer than a Hundred appears to me not only more elegant than No less than a Hundred, but strictly proper. --Baker 1770

Baker's remarks about fewer express clearly and modestly -- "I should think," "appears to me" -- his own taste and preference. [...]

How Baker's opinion came to be an inviolable rule, we do not know. But we do know that many people believe it is such. Simon 1980, for instance, calls the "less than 50,000 words" he found in a book about Joseph Conrad a "whopping" error.

The OED shows that less has been used of countables since the time of King Alfred the Great -- he used it that way in one of his own translations from Latin -- more than a thousand years ago (in about 888). So essentially less has been used of countables in English for just about as long as there has been a written English language. After about 900 years Robert Baker opined that fewer might be more elegant and proper. Almost every usage writer since Baker has followed Baker's lead, and generations of English teachers have swelled the chorus. The result seems to be a fairly large number of people who now believe less used of countables to be wrong, though its standardness is easily demonstrated.

MWCDEU then gives a couple of pages of illustrative example in both directions, dealing especially with the "common constructions" with countables where less continues to be used more often than fewer "in present-day written usage". The concluding advice:

If you are a native speaker, your use of less and fewer can reliably be guided by your ear. If you are not a native speaker, you will find that the simple rule with which we started is a safe guide, except for the constructions for which we have shown less to be preferred.

Read on at the link below, [included in that article is a link to the full description given by M-W in their book described at the start of this article. McTag and Contrex should both get one.]

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html

academics who seem to be bent on a campaign to oversimplify and dumb-down our beautiful language.