Then you should have no trouble fulfilling Spectre of Pithecanthropus’s request for modern academic or journalistic examples of the quantity usage of less.
I though it was mucus, but it’s not.
Man, I never get tired of that
I believe one usage found to be objectionable was “less cars.” Here is a link to 65 citations from the New York Times alone using that disfavored locution.
Bahh…I just use 1/more and am done with it 
Re: Q.E.D.:
My point is that English speakers haven’t adopted it as the unaffected norm; it’s generally only confirmation bias which leads some to think they generally notice instances of “less” with countables as grating most of the time, when, in fact, most must pass by without causing any severe annoyance, or else one would live in a constant state of frustration.
Re: Spectre of Pithecanthropus:
From John Updike’s “Gertrude and Claudius”, p.57: “Gerwindil was a godless brute who never did anything on less than three goblets of mead”.
p. 156: “One less witness, if witnesses were ever sought.”
Finding examples in academic articles is too easy. Just a random smattering:
Top of page 2, “Polygons have ears”, American Mathematical Monthly 1975: “…or else is a Jordan polygon with more than three vertices, but with one less vertex than P, so that…”.
Second paragraph, second page of “A land-bridge island perspective on mammalian extinction in western North American parks”, Nature 1987: “it had been sighted less than five times since… Species which had been sighted less than three times since…” [“fewer” is also used in similar contexts as well, in keeping with my point that the two are both acceptable].
“On the strength of comparisons in property testing”, Information and Computation, Feb. 25 2004: in abstract, “…cannot perform less queries (in the worst case) than…”, top of second page: “cannot be modified in e*d or less places to make it satisfy P”, middle of page 115 “we make (less than (2k - 1)! <= (2t - 1)!) queries according to…”
And, from page 5 of “Removal of precursors for disinfection by-products (DBPs) — differences between ozone- and OH-radical-induced oxidation” in The Science of Total Environment", June 22 2000: “Therefore, less OH-radicals are formed”.
I saw what you did there. Made me laugh, it did. Perhaps many more will laugh, too.
I tend to use “fewer” for countable things, if only for the fact that lots of people think “less” is wrong. I would however use “less” in the same manner as the quote above because the thing being counted can easily have fractions. Consider the same sentence, but with a slightly more temperate Gerwindil. “Gerwindil … never did anything on less than two and a half goblets of mead.” It seems to me that “fewer than two and a half” doesn’t make sense.
Personally I would say “fewer than 10 cars” (can’t really have a fraction of a car without using an absurd example) but “less than 10 litres of wine.”
That said, I wouldn’t correct anyone saying “less than 10 cars” or “fewer than 10 litres of wine.”
I’m not sure why, but I promise to work on it as soon as I get the flammable / inflammable / nonflammable thing worked out. I keep thinking that two words should be able to cover that subject.
If someone told me they had “greater cars” than someone else, I would assume they meant their cars were faster or more reliable or more tricked out (depending on their tastes), not that they had a greater number of cars.
Fair enough. Replace that example with “Coincidentally, Mistry writes about Parsis, a minority of less than a hundred thousand in India, …”, from John Updike’s article in The New Yorker here.
Dont. Do. It. Man.
Everybody I know that has tried has gotten burned.
Questions for you on a most delicious subject!
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What do you mean by the word codified? (No references to “code” please.)
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How do you determine if a usage guide is “wrongheaded”? And how is that even possible?
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By “reality,” do you mean what is currently in use in any given local? If so, should “reality” be the standard?
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How can a handbook “glance” at anything?
Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage is an impressive source. The Harbrace College Handbook is still considered the standard, to the best of my knowledge, for American universities. I think they are probably up to their sixteenth edition by now. The most recent that I have is the eleventh from 1990:
As for the examples that you gave: Some of them did not make me winch as much as I thought that they would, but that has to do with the complexity of the sentences, I think. Still others made me shudder. I would not expect someone savagely brilliant in science to always catch the differences in less and fewer in an academic paper when the focus is elsewhere. An English professor should before it is submitted for publication. Of course, the professor may work for Webster’s and disagree.
Here’s another take from Webster’s Collegiate:
I really liked it better just following Harbrace. It was fewer confusing.
The adverb is in agreement not with goblets, which are countable, but with the mead which is not.
Again, one less than the number of witnesses previously referred to or implied. It couldn’t be “one fewer witness(es).” It’s like “one less bell to answer” or “one less egg to fry”.
Again, we’re talking about a subtraction of one thing. I would be more convinced if your example said “…with three less vertices than P, so that…”
I’ll concede that this has a little more merit, at least IMO. Still it’s not what the OP is talking about. “Less cars on the road” is what grates. Or “less people going to the mall because of the recession.” Nobody here is harping on anyone for saying three is less than five, or San Francisco’s population is less than a million, or that you can buy a certain TV for less than $400.
Again: referring to a quantity of e^d or less. That’s not the issue here.
This one is yours. It is exactly the sort of thing we’re talking about, it does grate, and you have given us a worthy example.
I’m not sure I understand. Why wouldn’t it be, according to your alleged rule, “one fewer witness/bell/egg”? They’re all count nouns, and we are indeed counting them rather than measuring them, so to speak; one wouldn’t discuss half a witness in this context (or answer half a bell or whatever).
I don’t see why subtraction changes anything, but ok; perhaps, I suppose you must say, you just hadn’t yet in this thread articulated the alleged rule to the level of refinement you intended.
Is not “less than three times” an instance of using “less” with countables rather than measurables? But, alright; again, perhaps the alleged rule hadn’t yet been articulated to the level of refinement you intended…
I don’t understand what the distinction you’re drawing is with that particular one, but anyway, I gave three examples from this paper, including, in the abstract, the exact phrase you asked for, “cannot handle less queries”.
Hooray.
It’s because one thing is being subracted. But I could fry two fewer eggs, ring three fewer bells, etc.
Because it’s subtraction of one thing.
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Is not “less than three times” an instance of using “less” with countables rather than measurables? But, alright; again, perhaps the alleged rule hadn’t yet been articulated to the level of refinement you intended…
[/quote]
I did concede your point on this one, although strange as it seems, numbers themselves aren’t always countable in the grammatical sense.
You should indeed cheer. It’s not every day that someone returns with a point by point response that resulted from an earlier challenge or assertion.
As I get older I have fewer and fewer patience with this kind of thing.
I think one motivating factor in the accusations of prescriptivism is the premise that English is supposed to simple, ,unlike all those confusing foreign languages with their verb conjugations, extra tenses, and noun declensions. So, the argument continues, given “less” and “fewer”, the meaning of either of which is sure to be understood from the context, it would be arrogant to designate one as correct. However: it is natural for human language to be complex. As I said in my first post, it is also natural for it to have grammatical redundancy. “Fewer eggs” vs “Less eggs”–we know from the word “eggs”, just by itself, that it is a countable thing. So, the descriptivists argue, what difference does it make to say “less” instead of “fewer”? Well, from the point of communication, none. We all understand what is meant and the use of “fewer” is not required as such to show that the word “eggs” is countable. But it just is. Other languages have similar redundancies. In German for example, it is usually necessary to mark the plurality of a noun not only by some inflection on the noun itself, but also on the article as well as the adjective in many cases. Why is it not enough just to mark one of the parts of speech? If German were a computer programming language, it would be enough, but we’re talking about a natural human language. As I mentioned in my first post, if complexity is lost in one area of grammar over time, it is invariably replaced by different complexity elsewhere.
The case can be made that all spoken languages the world over are equally complex in one way or another.
Not really. The descriptivist’s objective is to describe language as it is used. The descriptivist does not make any appeal to simplicity or anything like that; rather, actual English usage, in the highest literary forms as well as the most common vernacular, is observed and conclusions about the rules of English are derived from that evidence instead of subjective notions of simplicity or whether something “grates.”
Do some English speakers mark the use of “less” with a count noun? Sure they do, and it would be fair to say that in formal registers and prestige dialects, that usage is avoided. However, to say that “less cars” is an error or “not English” in the same way that “me are going to the store” is an error or “not English” is patently ridiculous. The phrase “less cars” is a perfectly natural use of English that occurs in the daily speech of millions of real-deal educated American English speakers.
You have a style preference, which is perfectly ordinary and perfectly allowed. I myself dislike using the progressive aspect with stative verbs (as in, “Are you wanting to see a movie tonight?”). Nevertheless, however much the form “grates” on me, I would never pretend that people who use it are doing anything other than speaking unexceptionable American English.
I think a better analog would be “many” vs. “much”
There were many deer in the forest and there was much forest in the park.
By changing “less” to “fewer”, I found 663.
I think these kinds of debates are kind of pointless. You’re wrong if the majority thinks your wrong. And you’re only as wrong as the percentage of people who think you’re wrong. I could use the numbers to say that I (a person who thinks that the people who made the “one less” advertising campaign are idiots) am only 10% wrong, whereas you are 90% wrong. But what would be the point?