• 2 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle





















  • In the UK, we have Waitrose supermarkets, which have a “10 items or fewer” lane. The rest are “N items or less”. I wouldn’t go out of my way to find a Waitrose – they are fewer and further between than other kinds – but I certainly appreciate it when I shop at one and buy a small number of items.

    Likewise, with general usage and mis-usage of “less”, I wouldn’t go out of my way to correct anyone, but I enjoy it when “fewer” is used correctly. And I do so myself, of course!

    These sorts of shifts in language seem inevitable, and always seem to be in the direction of a decline in precision. But I wonder if that perception is just a cognitive bias: perhaps interesting and exciting words are emerging but we’re less likely to spot them until they themselves begin to decline in precision?