It would seem to me valuable that words differ so as to allow one to express fine distinctions of meaning
Sure, if they're needed they're nice to keep. Hoi Polloi seem to have decided that the difference between counting and measuring comparisons is not significant or that it can be handled by other means. The comic strip Jump Start did a joke on less vs. fewer once which ended with the phrase "there are less people in that line" being illustrated by one of the people picturing people erased at the waist or with missing arms or legs. Your normally intelligent person is not liable to be confused by the use of less to indicate a countable comparison since the context almost always gives that meaning. It would be easy to use recur or reoccur in a situation where the context would not give the necessary information.
what side did you take in the "he-she-it" controversy
For starters, your link led me to an entire nother thread. I had to change it to showthreaded to get to the right thread. Also, if you are trying to point someone to a specific post in a long thread (I include this for the education of strangers and newbies) it is good to include more information about the specific thread (or else bite the bullet and do it in threaded mode). Keiva's inadvertent misdirection may have come from the fact that he included more information than needed in the link; he should have cut it off after the post number (42471).
That said, I looked at the thread and I don't think that I even saw a he-she-it controversy. I mentioned that in Old English wif (woman) was neuter and wifman (female human being) was masculine merely to point out that English didn't always suffer from "natural" (take that, stales) gender.
