fewer uses of less
as anyone who knows me will attest, i am finicky with grammar. not that i'm perfect in that regard, far from it. but building on the experience of teaching english as a second language will make one's ears ache whenever they see something that flies in the face of what they have just taught.
it's like how i pronouce the word 'been'... i say it with a short i so that it comes out like a hurried 'bin'. however, when i was teaching students the correct way of saying the word i totally separated my interpretation from the lesson plan. i am | i was | i have BEEN - this is what i was instructing, not 'i have bin'... that's all fine and good but once i begin to navigate the teaching waters outside the boundaries of the instructional material i revert back to my clipped i and the synonym for garbage receptible.
of course i had no idea that i was doing this but my students sure picked up on the distinction. to top it off one of the other teachers, a woman from virginia, favoured another sound altogether so that her 'been' came out a relaxed 'ben'. one of my students soaked up these regional dialects like wine, swishing them around in his mouth and spitting them out to his liking. after a while (a very short while) i began to dread his raised hand and pointed questions about how i pronouced a particular word, or why i emphasized a word in exactly the way that i did. but it made me more carefully consider my own choice of words the distinct way that i would say them.
another lesson from my english teaching days involved the distinction between mass and count nouns. mass nouns are those nouns that cannot be separated into constituent parts. for example - flour (or water, or beer - count nouns for these would be bodies of water or bottles of beer). count nouns are easily numbered - 8 radios / cars / timepieces.
in doing comparisons involving mass nouns one can say that we have more or less of the noun, ie more wine today and less time to drink it.
count nouns can still use more, but substitute the word fewer for less - i have more bottles of wine in my store yet fewer customers making purchases.
finding a fewer in use today is seriously hard work. less has risen to prominence in popular and journalistic writing in the same way that gender has morphed to mean sex. both substitutions irk me, but i find the misplaced use of less when fewer is called for to be more awkward to read.
i'll see what kind of examples i can find in the next few days and list them for your perusal.
it's like how i pronouce the word 'been'... i say it with a short i so that it comes out like a hurried 'bin'. however, when i was teaching students the correct way of saying the word i totally separated my interpretation from the lesson plan. i am | i was | i have BEEN - this is what i was instructing, not 'i have bin'... that's all fine and good but once i begin to navigate the teaching waters outside the boundaries of the instructional material i revert back to my clipped i and the synonym for garbage receptible.
of course i had no idea that i was doing this but my students sure picked up on the distinction. to top it off one of the other teachers, a woman from virginia, favoured another sound altogether so that her 'been' came out a relaxed 'ben'. one of my students soaked up these regional dialects like wine, swishing them around in his mouth and spitting them out to his liking. after a while (a very short while) i began to dread his raised hand and pointed questions about how i pronouced a particular word, or why i emphasized a word in exactly the way that i did. but it made me more carefully consider my own choice of words the distinct way that i would say them.
another lesson from my english teaching days involved the distinction between mass and count nouns. mass nouns are those nouns that cannot be separated into constituent parts. for example - flour (or water, or beer - count nouns for these would be bodies of water or bottles of beer). count nouns are easily numbered - 8 radios / cars / timepieces.
in doing comparisons involving mass nouns one can say that we have more or less of the noun, ie more wine today and less time to drink it.
count nouns can still use more, but substitute the word fewer for less - i have more bottles of wine in my store yet fewer customers making purchases.
finding a fewer in use today is seriously hard work. less has risen to prominence in popular and journalistic writing in the same way that gender has morphed to mean sex. both substitutions irk me, but i find the misplaced use of less when fewer is called for to be more awkward to read.
i'll see what kind of examples i can find in the next few days and list them for your perusal.
posted by Ottawan Dave | 12:57 p.m.
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