So I was looking through my Facebook groups today (yeah, I really do get that bored at work), and I discovered that it uses the word “fewer” correctly when it comes to plural count nouns. That made me happy.
However, I also realized that it uses “fewer” for singular count nouns as well…
That made me not so happy.
Tags: count nouns, Facebook, fewer, grammar, nouns
What’s the correct when describing a singular change?
The thing is that, while “one fewer” and “one less” are both awkward, “one less” is far and away the more common of the two.
In some old rulebooks, perhaps “fewer” was the norm, but quite honestly, by today’s standards it’s kind of ridiculous to be used for the singular, even if you are talking about countable nouns.
Perhaps we should invent a completely new word to be used in place of fewer/less, since they’re both so awkward anyway. One fewess member? That has a certain elegance to it, I dunno.
Maybe we’ll just replace fewer with “nomnomgizzerbadgit”. One nomnomgizzerbadgit woman with cervical cancer, to quote the famous commercial.
Interesting… I was always under the impression that “fewer” and “more” were used when describing relative countability (ordinality), so “one fewer woman with cervical cancer”.
On the other hand, less is used when describing the cardinality of some set, as a noun: “The number of women with cervical cancer was less xxx years ago than now.”
Of course, it doesn’t matter anyway, and nomnomgizzerbadgit is as good a word as any… except it’s a bit long, what about nomzer? “One nomzer woman with cervical cancer” has a nice ring to it.