The Atlantic recently ran a sobering article on the prospects of nuclear war in our times. As a language nut, I found myself paying as much attention to how the article was written as I did to assessing my odds of being wiped from the face of the earth thanks to an obscure flaw in the - *ahem* - failsafe mechanisms of the worst technology that humanity has ever perfected.
I did, for a brief moment, also consider your odds of being annihilated, but quickly resolved that much as I cherish my readers, my survival is infinitely more important than yours. I’m sure you understand.
Anyhoo, the article in question contained this chillingly accurate, but somewhat odd-sounding sentence: “15 minutes or fewer is frighteningly little time for a considered human response.”
In my opinion, which is invariably the correct one, that sentence should begin “15 minutes or less…”. And I wager that to your ear, “15 minutes or less” sounds more natural too.
So why use fewer instead of less? Friends, someone was engaging in hypercorrection.
Hypercorrection is what Oxford Dictionary describes as “the use of an erroneous word form or pronunciation based on a false analogy with a correct or prestigious form.” One of the most common examples is the unnecessary use of “whom” as in “the person whom I met last night”.
The Atlantic writer or subeditor applied the rule that says if an amount is countable, like chickens or Mars Bars or nuclear warheads, then anything below the stated number is “fewer than”, not “less than”.
Countable is distinct from that which can only be measured. If the bathtub was really full yesterday but is only half full today, there is less water in it now, not fewer. Water is what linguists call a mass noun (also uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun and - in their tireless drive for brevity - simply “uncountable”).
And minutes, of which the writer counted fifteen, are surely countable.
Well, yes. Except - and this is the important bit, so listen up - generally people don’t think of minutes in terms of incremental units being added to or subtracted from one by one (as you might do with a flock of chickens or a bathtub full of Mars Bars).
For you and me, minutes are like water - 15 minutes is of less duration than 20 minutes and of more duration than 10. What it’s not, unless you’re an Atlantic editor, is a flock of minutes (or whatever collective noun you apply to this unit of time).
Does this make the Atlantic wrong? I wouldn’t go that far, but I do think someone’s being unnecessarily fussy. If they were prosecuted in court over this and I was their lawyer, I reckon I could get them a good plea bargain. That’s because - and prescriptivists you might not like what I’m about to say - the distinction between mass nouns and count nouns in English can get blurry, to say the least.
Let’s say we’re looking at a bin of sugar and you reckon there’s 50 cups’ worth in there. I say “no way, baby, there’s less than 30 cups’ worth in there”. By all but the most pedantic standards, what I’ve said is perfectly acceptable.
So now we test our measuring powers by putting the sugar into cups and placing them, one by one, on the table. When we’re done, there are exactly 29 cups (oh boy, right again!). Here’s the question: Are there less than or fewer than 50 cups of sugar on the table?
There’s no black and white answer to that question. Or if there is, it depends whether we’re counting cups or measuring sugar, and that hasn’t been explicitly stated.
Likewise with the 15 minutes in the Atlantic article. The editor was counting minutes and I was measuring time. Both are valid, even if the editor’s approach is a little odd.
Merriam-Webster sides with me on this, I think. It states than less than is often legitimately used of things that are countable, especially distances (“less than three miles”), sums of money (“less than twenty dollars”), units of time and weight (“less than five years” and “less than ten ounces”), and statistical enumerations (“less than 50,000 people”). All of which, it says, are often thought of as amounts rather than numbers.
Merriam-Webster points out that less than has been used for well over a thousand years in the way described. As a rule, if people have been widely employing a usage for that length of time, the usage is fine and its detractors are divorced from reality.
We can thank Englishman Robert Baker for the rule prohibiting the use of less than for countable nouns. In 1770, this pernickety busybody wrote a fussy tome called Reflections on the English Language, in which he included this troublesome passage:
This Word [less] is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do better. No fewer than a Hundred appears to me not only more elegant than No less than a Hundred, but more strictly proper.
That’s why, my friend, you get hot under the collar when your local supermarket tells you the express aisle is only for those with “12 items or less”. Not because it’s wrong, but because 250 years ago someone who doesn’t even warrant a Wikipedia entry (unlike the 19 Robert Bakers who do) decreed less inferior to fewer.
You want my advice? Don’t worry about the distinction between less than and fewer than, and trust your ear instead. As Merriam-Webster calmly states, “a definitive rule covering all possibilities is maybe impossible.” The one place you might want to take care is in formal writing, but only because some people will judge you poorly if you don’t display your chops in this area.
That’s dumb and unfair, but - like so much in human affairs - it’s also how it is.
You can find the Atlantic article here.
What I’m reading
I’ve just started reading Oil! by Upton Sinclair. What prompted me was watching the terrific movie There Will be Blood on Netflix a few nights back, which drew its inspiration from Sinclair’s novel. Published in 1926, Oil! is a child of its time - the language is a little archaic to my ears, with phrases like “oh boy"!” and words like “oculist” instead of “optician”. It’s written in a muscular, fast moving style that reminds me a little of Hemingway, but without the self-conscious stylistic tics that make Hemingway mildly annoying and eminently satirisable. I’m only a little way into it and looking forward to reading the whole thing. If it’s half as good as the movie, it’ll be well worth the effort.
Bits and specious
The James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST for short, has given us a view of the universe that has staggered even the most optimistic scientists. Among its revelations are many things no one expected, including five giant galaxies that look to have formed far sooner after the Big Bang than previously thought possible. If the observations prove accurate (and the consensus is that they will), the theory of how the early universe formed will need serious revision.
On that note, let me say this is what I love about science. Nothing - and I do mean nothing - is ever set in stone. What we believe is true is always contingent on the evidence, and if the evidence changes, it’s our beliefs that must change. I don’t understand those who say science destroys the poetry of life. In my view, it’s the most reliable system we have to keep wonder alive and prevent us falling into the seductive trap of believing we’ve arrived at the ultimate truth of anything.
I know all of this has fewer to do with language than most of what I write about.
Which reminds me of the wonderful name of a Japanese restaurant I saw years ago close to the lawyer-y part of town: Sosume.
Quote of the week
Rule #1 in arguments: If you’re losing, start correcting their grammar.
Anonymous
Always love to read about science in a language newsletter!
Hi Ken, great article as always however I believe I’ve spotted an error.
‘Merriam-Webster sides with me on this, I think. It states than ...’
(should read states that)?
It jumped out at me sorry, but I could be wrong.