A Tricky Less/Fewer Construction
The rule is (Okay, maybe I should say “the rules are.)
- Use “less” when you’re measuring
- Use “fewer” when you’re counting.
Warning: pay attention to the context!
This sentence looks okay, right?
Astronomers have detected less than half of the estimated 25,000 near-Earth objects thought to be 459 feet in size or greater.
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-space-0c3f02e5-1453-4f8c-b9fa-6dd90db64456.html
“Less than half” feels correct, doesn’t it? That’s because with fractions, usually you’re measuring. But this sentence is counting asteroids, so it should say “fewer.”
When you write, be alert! Pay attention! Here’s a picture of an asteroid so you have something besides text to look at. Thanks, NASA.
This post first appeared on The Writing Rag.
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Grammar Joke
She’s right of course. Get it right in your own writing, and don’t correct others unless they ask. Or to make a joke.
Use “fewer” when you’re counting and “less” when you’re measuring.
This post first appeared on The Writing Rag.
An Exception to the Less-Fewer Rule
When we count things, the rule it to say “fewer,” and when we measure things, we say “less.” So we have fewer apples, but less distance. Since we measure time, normally we say less.
But you can count time, too, and when that happens, you should use fewer. So the guy in this comic has it wrong.
Just be sure you’re counting units of time, not measuring the time itself.
A Quick Correct “Fewer”
I was sitting at a restaurant this morning and showed this comic to my waiter (Hi, Rich!) and he laughed. I saw a quick writing lesson, though; one I’ve mentioned before: when to use less and when to use fewer. Use “fewer” when you’re counting.
If they had used “stuff” instead of “things,” “less” would have been appropriate.
PS—yes, she should have said “there are” instead of “there’s.”
A Difficult Read with a Simple Goof
This post pulls out a mistake from an essay from the Hoover Institute that is heavy-duty reading. If you’re looking for something with more, um, substance than your average internet article (Heavier than even something from Scientific American), go read it. It’ll take a while. It’s about system security (such as computers, national infrastructure, and so on) and it’s good. Here’s the link. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Now having said all that, they spoil it (okay, some of it) by making an elementary error in grammar that introduces an ambiguity into something that ought not be ambiguous. The article is hard enough to follow already, (and most of the writing is actually fairly well done) so we don’t need more difficulties. Here’s the bad passage:
In the absence of purposeful disconnectedness at critical points, the mechanics of complexity then take hold so that we undergo “a switch between [continuous low grade volatility] to . . . the process moving by jumps, with less and less variations outside of jumps.”
Should that be “less and less variation,” or should it be “fewer and fewer variations”? At least they’re quoting someone else (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “The Long Peace is a Statistical Illusion,” accessed January 23, 2018, http:// docplayer.net/48248686–The–long–peace–is–a–statistical–illusion.html), but they need to fix the grammar here so we have at least a chance to know what they mean.
I mentioned this error a couple times in the past. Here’s one link: https://writing-rag.com/1863/another-lesson-about-less-and-fewer/ You can find a few more if you do a search in the upper right corner of the page.
