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Carpal Tunnel
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>>What? Petitio Principii? Gimme a break!<
>May the break you ask for be given you.
isn't that begging the question?
-joe (I'm so confused) friday
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I hasve a friend who's an FBI agent here in Denver. The other day there was a bank robbery, witnessed by a panhandler who was sitting on the street corner cadging quarters. Joe spent the whole afternoon questioning the beggar.
TEd
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Perhaps Faldage is right. "Begging the question" is so unclear, and petitio principii is in another language, for goshsakes! I think we ALL deserve a break from complex or obscure terms which require any effort to understand.
Take "hydrogen peroxide" for instance. How complex and obscure! Why don't we all agree just to call it "bubbly stuff." That's much more logical. And foreign words like "Champagne" don't tell us anything about what the stuff is like. Let's call it "bubbly stuff" too.
And just so we don't get them confused, let's call hydrogen peroxide "bubbly stuff for cuts" and call Champagne "bubbly stuff for parties."
Whew, isn't that better? Now, I've gotta turn off this box that has light coming out of it and get down to that big building where they teach people stuff.
Later,
m.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Metameta notes: And foreign words like "Champagne" don't tell us anything about what the stuff is like. Let's call it "bubbly stuff" too
What do you think most of the population of New Zealand call it? Especially with the French getting uppity about what is and isn't champagne, whether "methode champagnoise" and "methode traditionelle" are also breaching the brand and what have you. "Bubbly". A new brand!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Pooh-Bah
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>"Bubbly"
The term used here these days seems to be "fizz" - posh fizz, cheap fizz, it's all fizz.
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old hand
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> appeared the sign : "ten items or fewer !
Gotta disagree here. The English for this is "ten items or less".
Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by "disagree", but fewer is indeed correct. Fewer refers to the number of somethings, while less refers to the amount of something. Basically, less is singular, fewer is plural.
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enthusiast
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That's what I disagree with. In normal English we say two is less than three, someone with ten apples has got less than someone with twelve, and so on. No count/mass distinction is made with 'more', which functions as comparative of both 'much' and 'many'. The relatively rare word 'fewer' just strikes me as a pedants' revival, an artificial and unnatural distinction gleaned out of some obsolete grammar.
The only notion of "correct" that holds water is "what native speakers naturally say".
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enthusiast
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To my surprise I find the OED cites less examples than I'd expected. Normally these fictitious rules were routinely broken by people like Dickens, but there are no examples for several centuries before his period.
The first use of less in sense 1.c., as a synonym of fewer, is from King Alfred's translation of Boëthius:
Swa mid læs worda swa mid ma
where it's originally an adverb governing the partitive genitive worda.
Then Caxton wrote By cause he had so grete plente of men of hys owne countre, he called the fewer and lasse to counseyll of the noble men of the Cyte.
Then Lyly wrote in Euphues that I thinke there are few Vniuersities that have lesse faultes than Oxford, many that have more.
(And no I'm not putting forward Lyly as an arbiter of elegance.)
Then there are only modern quotations, second half of last century onward; and it looks as if it first got into print in mathematical writing, where naturally you don't want to pronounce the relation in a < b differently depending on what the entities being compared are.
The OED says the synonymy with fewer is 'Freq. found but generally regarded as incorrect'.
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old hand
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To my surprise I find the OED cites less examples than I'd expected.
See, using "less" there is absolutely wrong. It just sounds wrong. You're talking about the number of examples and therefore "fewer" is correct.
I ran that sentence through the Lotus Word Pro grammar check and this was the result:
These rules flag errors of mass/count agreement. An error in mass/count agreement is a conflict between the number of the noun (singular or plural) and the adjectives before the noun that tell how much or how many. For example, one rule in this set will flag a sentence like 'There are less mistakes in this document,' because the adjective 'fewer', not 'less', is the correct one to use with a plural noun.
A lot of what we talk about on this board are commonly misunderstood grammar rules. This is one example. Just because it's commonly misused doesn't make it right.
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Carpal Tunnel
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JazzO sez: using "less" there is absolutely wrong
What it boils down to is whether the native speaker of the language sees any meaningful difference between the situation in which what is being talked about is measurable and that in which it is countable. If the speaker sees no such difference then it makes no sense to use a different word in one instance than in the other. Less is easier to say than fewer and therefore is preferable to the native speaker.
There are many rules that used to be used, e.g., separate verb endings for each person and number, use of a different pronouns for plural and singular in the second and even different forms of the pronouns for nominative (now usually called subjective) and dative/accusative (now usually called objective) in the second person plural (it's not who do you trust or whom do you trust, it's whom do ye* trust). All these rules were forgotten because they were seen as being unnecessary. I regret the loss of meaningful distinctions such as the difference between virulent and virile or enormity and enormousness but I refuse to mourn the loss of a distinction between less and fewer.
Show me a case where there could be a misunderstanding based on the violation of this rule and I may recant.
*Ænigma doesn't even recognize ye.
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