Things have gotten better and progress has been made from times past, it just seems worse now because we have more access to information. We’ve come far, and have further to go!

    • Womble@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      The less/fewer distinction is arbitrary Victorian bullshit flying directly in the face of how English is used. The only point of it was to try and make English more like Latin and allow aristocrats who spoke Latin to look down on those without expensive private education.

      Please dont perpetuate it.

        • Womble@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21·
          1 year ago

          I do beg your pardon, it was Georgian not Victorian era when this nonsense was dreamed up for no reason other than preference for trying to cram Latin-esque cases into english.

          https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-genuine-rule-dictates-the-use-of-less-or-fewer-cs25kv8s5

          The very notion of a neat distinction between fewer and less according to whether the noun is countable or not is a myth. It was invented out of whole cloth by an ill- informed 18th-century pedant called Robert Baker in his book Reflections on the English Language (1770). He proposed this distinction not as a hard-and-fast rule of grammar, moreover, but as a tentative suggestion with caveats (“I should think . . . it appears to me . . . ”) that you won’t find in modern style guides.

          The wiki article on it notes that

          The Cambridge Guide to English Usage notes that the “pressure to substitute fewer for less seems to have developed out of all proportion to the ambiguity it may provide in noun phrases like less promising results”. It describes conformance with this pressure as a shibboleth and the choice “between the more formal fewer and the more spontaneous less” as a stylistic choice.

          i.e. it is a shibboleth for saying “I am educated unlike you uncultured lot who use natural sounding language”