3259 Less and fewer
This is probably as lost a cause as diagramming sentences, but at a blog I was reading tonight I saw a phrase that was like fingernails on a blackboard, but I had no idea why. "I think that less and less people have other people in their lives enough." So I just punched it into Google and found a blog called Pedant's Corner, who wrote that you use fewer with countable nouns, and less with noncountable:"The most important thing to appreciate here is the distinction between countable and non-countable things. This distinction is not always clear, but it usually is. If you consider people, you can always count them. (Even conjoined twins count as two distinct people.) There is always a distinct number of people in any given group. Contrast this with a quantity of water. Water is not a countable thing, even though it is measurable. You could try to confuse this by saying that even water is made of discrete molecules that can be counted, but in practice you don't usually think of water that way: instead, you measure it on a scale like gallons or litres."
Think of many or much: too many (implying few), or too much (implying less).
Seeing the sign at the check-out, "Ten items or less" doesn't help. It's grammatically incorrect, but it's everywhere.Source URL: https://maryelizabeth-winstead.blogspot.com/2006/12/3259-less-and-fewer-this-is-probably-as.html
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