Quote:
Originally Posted by NullNix
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.
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Sounds like the usual for the English language -- every rule has more exceptions than conforming items.
"
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
--James D. Nicoll