[sjfan]

Originally Posted by BookCat

rcentros: Where are you from? (Ends sentence with preposition!) In Britain 'public school' means boarding school; that place where you spend oodles of money in order that your child has a 'superior' education. The other type is a state school. I'm not sure to which you are refering.

His profile says he's in the US (Texas), in the US a public school what the British would call a state school

I can't remember which poster mentioned this, but there is a great deal of difference in the meanings of 'less' and 'fewer'.

The particular canard I was referring to is the idea that less shouldn’t be used with respect to countable items. That’s never actually been an accurate characterization of English. Robert Baker stated it as a matter of personal preference in one of his style books in the 18th century and it morphed into one of those weird prescriptivist “rules” that had no relationship to how the language was actually used.

In actual English, “less” has been used with countables at least since the time of Alfred the Great—far longer than modern English has existed as a language. And it’s been continuously used even in high literature and other formal contexts with respect to countables (see Language Log for some numbers on how common it is both today and historically). The purported rule is simply wrong.

Webster's Dictionary of English Usage chimes in (with appropriate references to the OED for those east of the pond):

The OED shows that less has been used of countables since the time of King Alfred the Great — he used it that way in one of his own translations from Latin — more than a thousand years ago (in about 888). So essentially less has been used of countables in English for just about as long as there has been a written English language. After about 900 years Robert Baker opined that fewer might be more elegant and proper. Almost every usage writer since Baker has followed Baker's lead, and generations of English teachers have swelled the chorus. The result seems to be a fairly large number of people who now believe less used of countables to be wrong, though its standardness is easily demonstrated.

Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage also discusses:

It should be borne in mind, however, that there is ample historical warrant for the type less roads, less people, etc. Such uses originate from the [Old English] construction of Iæs adv. (quasi-sb.) with a partitive genitive' (OED). In OE, læs worda meant literally 'less of words'. When the genitive plural case vanished at the end of the OE period the type less words took its place, and this type has been employed ever since...