Wednesday, June 11, 2025
More or fewer, many or less
At Chez Boca, Bunny is the prescriptivist in the household, and I the descriptivist. So while “Grammar rules you can stop sticking to” meshed with my biases, Bunny remained unconvinced with a small exception towards not ending a sentence with a preposition.
But the majority of our discussion centered around the use of “fewer” and “less.”
The rule Bunny was taught was to use “fewer” for a countable number of items and “less” for uncountable or fungible items.
For example,
we have fewer cookies around here because we had less flour to make them
(I originally ended this sentence with “to work with” but I wanted to avoid ending with a preposition).
I always say “less” but I suspect this has less to do with my descriptivism and more to do with programming,
where x < 3 is translated to “x is less than three.”
It just seems weird to say “x is fewer than three,”
despite most numbers on a computer system being countable,
if potentially large
(the only exceptions would be ±inifinty and NaN).
I also wondered about the opposites of “fewer” and “less.” When I asked Bunny for the opposite for “fewer” she said “more,” and when asked for the opposite of “less” she also said “more.” To her, the word “more” could be applied to either countable items, like “I need more cookies,” and for fungible items, like “I need more flour.” But that struck me as odd—why separate words for “a smaller number or amount of” and not for “a greater number or amount of?” Why does “more” get a pass for both concepts, and not something like “many” for countable items, and “more” for fungible items? Why the rule for “less” and “fewer?” I need many cookies, and I need more flour to make them.
After our discussion, I thought about this for a bit. While Robert Baker made this distinction in 1770 (per the video), I have to wonder why he felt the distinction needed to be made, applying “fewer” to numbers rather than “less.”
At first, I thought it may have something to do with the Norman conquest of England. As my 1924 copy of Roget's Treasury Of Words says: “[i]t is interesting to note that the French names for different kinds of food became restricted to the cooked meats; while the English names were reserved for the living animals.” It also noted the act of word doubling—using both the Norman-French and Saxxon terms, such as humble and lowly, poor and needy, act and deed, aid and abet, use and wont, will and testament, and assault and battery.
Could this be a reason for the distinction between “fewer” and “less?”
It's not due to the Norman invasion that's for sure.
While looking through my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, I found the word “less” is an Old English word from Northumbria, having been a word in both Old Frisian and Old Teutonic. The usage meaning “smaller quantity” didn't first appear until 1314. And as Oxford states, the opposite is “more.”
The word “few” is also an Old English word, also in Old Frisian and Old Teutonic but importantly, not from Northumbria! It's meaning of “smaller quantity” or “a small number” is documented from around 900, and it's “antithesis” (as Oxford calls it) is “many!”
How about that?
But I'm now of the opinion that Robert Baker wanted to signal he wasn't part of the hoi polloi and came up with a pointless distinction. Bunny remains unconvinced of my theory.
