i use ‘greater’ but, is there anything grammatically wrong with that construct? i just feel that you might as well say “The more threads blah blah blah.”
Greater. The “blah blah blah” one isn’t the same thing at all.
(At least you didn’t say "amount of threads.)
At the other end of the scale, I find that it grates to hear people use ‘less’ when they should say ‘fewer’. I bite my tongue however since it seems that this has become an accepted usage.
The rule I was taught is that fewer (and, I assume, greater) are used for countable quantities, and less (and, I assume, more) are used for uncountable quantities.
I was really hungry. I ate some crackers. I’m now less hungry, but I have fewer crackers left over.
You can having *more *things or *less *things (although some prescriptivists prefer *greater *and fewer). But a number is something that is large or small, not more or less. Use one of these:
The more threads I read, the more confused I get.
The greater the number of threads I read, the more confused I get.
is this sentence wrong then? it sounds ok, unlike the title of the OP.
The number of threads I read daily is more than Bob.
IMHO–it doesn’t sound OK to me. You are saying that “the number is more than Bob.” Alternatives:
The number of threads I read daily is greater than the number that Bob reads.
I read more threads daily than Bob.
hmm, it should have been, “The number of threads I read daily is more than Bob’s.” but i see it now. i will remember this
greater crackers? and more things means something different than greater things.
In this one you are comparing a count of something to a possessive. This requires the reader to infer “Bob’s what?” and may not be exactly correct grammatically but I guess most people will understand what you mean. In this more common example I think most people will find the first one less awkward:
My daily commute is longer than Bob’s.
vs.
The number of miles I drive each day is longer than Bob’s.
The second one switches gears in the middle. I don’t know the technical grammar terms for this sort of thing.
“more the number” is grammatically incorrent, and is technically different from “greater the number”
"more the number of " means there are more numbers than your counterpart (3, 5, and 7 vs. 8 and 9), and combines a plural adjective with a singular noun. “greater the number” means there is a single number that is bigger than it’s counterpart (9 vs. 5).