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Comment by ShadowBanThis01 | Hacker News Reader

In a time when a more and more people can't spell "too," it seems ambitious to school them on "less" vs. "fewer."

But when I do try to explain why "less" and "fewer" are not interchangeable, I usually just say, "Do you want fewer syrup on your pancakes?"

Then there's "transition" as a verb: Do you illumination a room when it's dark?

We can go on and on, but we can't leave this one out: "would of." I always call that out in any comment forum. This just can't be let go.

And now, Weird Al has some words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc

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> And now, Weird Al has some words

A linguist had some words in response[0]

> While "grammar nerds" are psyched about Weird Al's new "Word Crimes" video, many linguists are shaking their heads and feeling a little hopeless about what the public enthusiasm about it represents: a society where largely trivial, largely arbitrary standards of linguistic correctness are heavily privileged, and people feel justified in degrading and attacking those who don't do things the "correct" way.

I know who I'm trusting to speak confidently about language usage.

[0] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13521

I believe in self-reliance.

> In a time when a more and more people can't spell "too," it seems ambitious to school them on "less" vs. "fewer."

Over half of the American population reads below a 6th grade level. We should encourage them to improve at every opportunity.

I fully agree. And yet you see people (above in this thread, even) who defend illiteracy with the old "you're just a grammar nazi; language is a 'living entity'" trope.

Transition is an odd one to get hung up on. We may not illumination but we do vacation, function, question, proposition, requisition, audition, reposition, and many other words of similar etymology.

Not really. Many of those do not have other verb forms that mean the same thing.

I don’t understand what you mean here.

The verb form of "transition" is "transit." But there is no similar form of "function" (like "funct," for example).

Therefore the comparison is invalid.

Vacate, query (or inquire), propose, require, audit, (re)posit. Idk about function but the word might be out there. The thing is that all of these have slightly shifted meanings when denominalized in English. To proposition someone isn’t just to propose something. And for a liquid to transition into vapor isn’t for it to transit.

Edit: We don’t have a straight verb but we do have fungible. So we could try to bring funge into the mix as the “proper” verb.

Note that I said "many." And yes it is "transit" when you go from water to vapor.

I do like "funge." Let's go for it! I'd be gruntled.

I disagree that to transit is the right verb form of transition in general. Transit (to my ear) is pretty much limited to a change of place, usually even through something (you might “transit a stretch of wood”, to steal Merriam-Webster’s example). Transition is more generally about a state of change.

By the same token, you could still reject to question because the verb to quest exists.

Well, that's... like... your opinion, man. But not supported by etymology.

"Quest" and "question" are also not a valid comparison, because the two forms aren't even clearly the same word. For example, if someone goes on a quest through the jungle, you don't say "his question through the jungle was interrupted by a phone call from home." Or, "he questioned from one end of the jungle to the other."

But quest and question have the same etymology, just like transit and transition. Having the same etymology clearly does not mean that the words cannot diverge in meaning. And if you looked up transit and transition in a dictionary, you’d find that they’re considered distinct in meaning, much along the lines of what I wrote.

Which dictionary?

And quest/question are not parallel to transit/transition. If you think otherwise, please provide an example.

Merriam-Webster, OED, Wiktionary. (If you have a preferred dictionary not on the list, I’m sure you can look there yourself.) All of them have some variant of “to pass through” as the primary meaning of to transit and “to change from one state, place, etc. to another” as the meaning of to transition.

And I didn’t claim that quest and question had a similar relation as transit and transition in meaning, only that in both cases, the two words have the same etymological root. I mentioned this in reference to your claim that my opinion was not supported by etymology. It doesn’t have to be, because etymology doesn’t dictate the current meaning of a word, it can just try to explain it.

Merriam-Webster lists transition as both noun and verb from at east 1946.

The verbs transit and transition mean different things. The former is the physical movement, the latter is a change of state.

In the process of evaporation, water transitions from liquid to gaseous state. It doesn't *transit from liquid to gas.

Then there's the ongoing weakening of strong verbs.

The past tense of "write" is not "writed". The past tense of "stand" is not "standed".

I think it has merit since it's easier to remember and is more consistent with other verbs. There is no (good) reason for only a few verbs being so different.

Wow, is that becoming a thing? I haven't seen this phenomenon yet.

> But when I do try to explain why "less" and "fewer" are not interchangeable, I usually just say, "Do you want fewer syrup on your pancakes?"

This feels like a strawman: As evidenced by the fact that everyone would agree your example sentence is ungrammatical, clearly "less" and "fewer" are not strictly interchangeable, either prescriptively or descriptively.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't see how your example is relevant to the cases where people do in fact use "less" to mean "fewer" (or vice versa).

With people, for instance? I commonly hear "less people" these days. It's weird to me to think of people as being like water or sand.

First: That's not what a strawman is. Second: If the relevance isn't clear, I leave it to you to suggest a better example.

The problem with the example is: Some has used less where you would have preferred fewer. You answer with an example, where fewer is used but only less is generally considered grammatical. (In other words, the replacement goes in the opposite direction.) But it is perfectly consistent to say that fewer is restricted to countable nouns while less can be used universally.

"Consistent" with what?

Consistent with how language works. Words have partial overlaps and “subset” relations all the time.

In the case of less and fewer, there isn’t even really a problem, because there are very few cases where using less when fewer would (also) be appropriate leads to confusion. (Otherwise the same distinction would surely also exist for more.)

I’m afraid, the only real “problem” is that for people who are accustomed to the distinction, using the “wrong” one gives a nails-on-chalkboard sensation.

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