Quote:
Originally Posted by DMB
Don't worry about it. The word "more" has two opposites, not one. They are "less" and "fewer".
"Fewer" is applied only to countable things; "less" to everything else.
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That's too strong.
Fowler notes that this is only true 'in most circumstances', and devotes several hundred words to elucidating some of the circumstances when this is not so. Huddleston & Pullum's
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, as ever, goes into further detail, devoting pages 1126--1128 to the problem, with examples of
less use that do not match your expectations including countable entities such as amounts of time (
She left less than ten minutes ago), comparatives following
no in which both are valid (
He made no less/fewer than fifteen mistakes),
or after a numeral (
You pass if you make ten mistakes or less) and others... this is horribly complicated and nobody quite knows why the language has settled out as it has, whether it has settled out, or what the rules even are. As usual with famous rules of thumb, it is tangled by people overcorrecting, with some people no doubt considering that some of Huddleston's examples would be valid with
fewer, though to me they would all seem horrifically clumsy that way.