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Not so fast with the "fetish" tag, please. My usage of less and fewer was learned from infancy. Okay, for those of you who can't read fast I'll write more slowly.  No, I don't object to 'fewer', and thinks it's a perfectly natural word. I do use it myself, and have been finding more recently that I've been using it where I would formerly have unselfconsciously said 'less', so I've had to examine my thoughts on the matter. It's not a total fetish, you're right, though it can be in some hands.
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What really concerns me is that what we are seeing now is the institutionalization of usages which creep in out of ignorance and illiterate usage; viz., the indiscriminate confusion of lie/lay, infer/imply, and too many others to list. The result is a decrease in precision and clarity in the language.
Yes, this is my objection too. Although I decry rule-based prescriptivism, I am all for good language against bad language. The loss of useful terms is to be deprecated and if possible opposed. Beg the question is useful in its right sense, and the misuse of it has no value of its own, so I'm vigorous in opposing its misuse.
But case-based, not rule-based. The lie/lay distinction doesn't seem so important, because most verbs don't need separate transitive forms. Misuse can sound quite illiterate, but I would be reluctant to impose my class attitudes if it became really widespread.
Semicolons are the bolts in the tracery of my prose; I feel I haven't been working if I don't have a few to give elegance to the thing.
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NicholasW expounds: Semicolons are the bolts in the tracery of my prose; I feel I haven't been working if I don't have a few to give elegance to the thing which has nothing to do with this post but is such a beautiful line that I must convey my appreciation to its author.
I'm really responding to the begging the question question. There are many phrases which are misconstrued due to the changing of definitions of key words. A classic example is the exception proves the rule. Presumably we are expected to believe that the more exceptions we have the more the rule is proved. Prove at the time of the coining of that old cliché* had the meaning test. The rule could be proved and found wanting.
*Ha! I thought that would happen; Ænigma "corrected" cliché to [cliche].
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In reply to:
English has more words...
I thought that the notion that English has more words, by far, than any other language was a generally accepted notion. I've seen it often enough, notably, I believe, in Lincoln Barnett's Treasure of our Tongue. The number of words in the English language is estimated at well above a million, not even counting the arcana of specialized argots and scientific words. To me, what makes English an "advanced language" is the availability of words which have a very precise meaning, which lends clarity and precision when those qualities are wanted, also a large stock of words which can be chosen for beauty of expression. So, although a well-educated person may know 50,000 or more words, he probably does not make use of more than 5,000 max. on a regular basis. The less- and uneducated know and use far fewer, and are more likely to need to resort to grunts and body language to reinforce or interpret what they are saying, which is what you get in other languages with scanty vocabulary.
Your idea that English expresses a wide range of ideas in few words is, IMHO, erroneous. It is true that a sort of Basic English can be taught. During WWII, there were numbers of exiled personnel, including pilots and scholars, from Nazi-occupied countries like Poland, who wanted to offer their services to the Allies, but who spoke no English. The U.S. Army set up a training progrem which included a language school. The language teachers developed and taught this "Basic English" which had a vocablulary of only about 1000 words/expressions (later pared down to about 500), mostly compounds of basic words like come, go, look, give, up, down, so that instead of the students having to learn ascend, arrive, observe, they could use go up, come in, look at, etc.. This worked quite well, and students learned English well enough to function, even if their English often sounded odd and was inelegant. This is the factor which makes English the most popular language in the world: it is relatively easy to learn enough English to communicate. At the same time, English is reckoned to be one of the most difficult languages to master because of the huge number of words and the subtle differences among what seem to be words meaning the same thing; also the huge number of meanings which can never adequately be expressed by a dictionary, but which are in everyday use.
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Your explanation of "The exception proves the rule" relieves me of a long-felt, nagging tension about that phrase.
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If Faldage's explanation of the "exception proving the rule" is correct - and I believe it probably is - then it comes strictly from scientific/mathematical/statistical hypothesis testing and therefore can't be all that old.
Does anyone have any reference for when it was first used?
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Two posts to the one thread - whoa, the Jazz police will be after me! While I agree with Faldage's facts and figures, he hasn't actually provided an explanation of why English is so easy for foreigners to make themselves understood in with a relatively low level of vocabulary and syntax. The reason is, I think, that incorrect word order will generally sound wrong but, because of our lack of semantically-important word endings, will be understandable. I had to sit through a presentation by a fellow from Myanmar in November whose grasp of English word order was pretty damned tenuous (in fact, I think I learned something about Burmese language word order), yet I understood what he was on about. And that's not the first example of the phenomenon. Are there any other languages (which we know of amongst us) which allow this kind of indiscriminate jumbling up of words without losing the basic meaning?
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Cap K asks Does anyone have any reference for when it (prove meaning test) was first used?
The AHD isn't terribly specific here but it does say in its etymology for the word: Middle English proven, from Old French prover, from Latin probare, to test, from probus, good. which would suggest that it had the meaning test. We'll have to look it up in the OED to get the straight skinny and mine is at home.
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Perhaps I've misunderstood Cap Kiwi's point, but it seems to me that the word order is more important in languages that don't have variable word endings. In Latin, the word order can vary tremendously and the meaning can still be gleaned from the endings on the words, which make clear which word is the subject, which the direct object, etc. To a lesser degree, in Spanish and Italian you can do this, as there are different pronouns for various things, such as direct vs. indirect object.
As an example (dusting off some long-ago-stashed Latin learning) "Puella agricolam amat" is "The girl loves the farmer" and can only be that because puella is the nominative (i.e. subject of the verb), but "Amat puella agricolam" and even "Agricolam amat puella" also mean that she loves him, not the other way around. This kind of mixing in English would completely change the meaning of the sentence, implying that the farmer also loves the girl, which would be begging the question, no?
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Yes, Hyla, you can get away with it in Latin, although I'm sure that the word order conveyed emphasis and other meaning regardless. Also, it's not commonly used at the meetings I attend ...  Perhaps I overstated the case. Of course an attentive native speaker of most languages can eventually untangle a syntactically garbled sentence. We just seem to be able to do it more easily in English due to a lack of alternative verb formations, in particular. I'm told that in Japanese and Chinese, if you vary the word order from the conventional, the meaning can be completely different. BelMarduk may be able to confirm my impression (gleaned from my long-ago scholastic brushes with the language) that word order is important to meaning in French. FWIW What I think I was trying to get across is the notion that anagrams in English are easier to untangle than in other languages.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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