Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Thornton
I doubt that they'll notice - your letter was excellent.
I just can't help noticing fewer/less because it's one of my wife's pet peeves - one often hears shouts of "FEWER!" at the television in our house, as they (even the BBC nowadays) get it wrong again.
Of course, if enough people get it "wrong", it becomes right, because language evolves over time. Probably a sign of my old age  |
It is an interesting distinction. I think the way the term "resources" is often used is not as a plural noun, but as a large pool of fungible capacity, like a pudding. "We are going to put less of our pudding in the cup and more in the bowl". It doesn't make sense grammatically, but it does under the alternate conceptual paradigm. Like, say, "the waters of life", it/they are not treated as a collection of individual entities but as a homogeneous mass.
