Fewer or Less?

First panel:

She’s counting the years, so she should have said “fewer and fewer years,” though she could also have said “less time.” We measure two things: time and distance. Pretty much everything else we count. Time and Distance you have to pay attention to because sometimes we count units of time or distance, but those two measures can be imprecise and subdivided, and then measuring is appropriate.

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Look up “homonym” in the search box for more of these. Gasoline alley is good for language humor. I’ll bet this issue is a stumbling block for some ESL students of English.

Care to add a homonym pair (or trio) of your own to the list?

The normal term is “folk etymology,” but I’m pretty sure these are just plain fake.

I confess that I don’t get the one in the first panel about laxitives and IBM. I invite you to explain that one to me in the comments.

Redundancy is when you unnecessarily include a word that means the same thing as another word in the sentence. I say this myself sometimes, but usually in the reverse order. Last panel.

So do you say “little tiny” or “tiny little”?

The current “Nancy” comic frequently creates its punchline by using the last cell to illustrate the bad things in the previous panels. In this case, though, she is also correct in her grammar.

This applies to double comparatives, too (more prettier, for example).