Less? or Fewer?

The less/fewer distinction in English is pretty basic. The rule seems unambiguous, and has to do with continuous vs discrete, uncountable vs countable: less water, fewer drops of water; less stuff, fewer items.

Yet the rule is often transgressed, sometimes avoidably (as in the photo above) and sometimes not. What are we to do with usages like “She gave me a hundred books, more or less”? No-one would argue for “more or fewer”– the exceptional usage is too thoroughly entrenched.

Part of the less/fewer confusion may arise from the fact that there’s no choice at the other end of the spectrum: more water, more drops, more stuff, more items. Or from the fact that Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, and a host of other languages manage to get by with a single word for both concepts. Even Esperanto doesn’t make the distinction. (Interestingly, if Google Translate is to be trusted, the Scandinavian languages do make a distinction, as does Russian, although Polish and Ukrainian do not.)

So why do we have the distinction in English? Apparently, because it’s there in Latin: minus for less, pauciores for fewer. (The etymologically excitable will want to note that in fact English few and Latin pau- are cognates.) While the Romance languages have all dropped the distinction, English has retained it.

Whether English needs to retain it is another story. Some of us experience unpleasant visceral reactions on seeing a sign like the one at the head of this post; others don’t even notice. The question, with all such instances of a language in continuous evolution, is which fights are worth fighting, and which are best given up as lost causes.

IMHO, the less/fewer distinction is worth defending.