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Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

My personal rule as a recovering grammar school victim: don’t correct nits if you’re not going to add some cool trivia or at least provide some gentle, kind way to navigate the same confusion next time.

Less/fewer is probably a lost cause, and a little bit of why is this kind of useless correction. If those who correct can’t or won’t explain why one is correct over the other, then it simply isn’t.

ETA: a fun comment below points me to a running joke I was unaware of; my apologies if this was an instance of it that I missed. I am not really a television person but this feels like a significant bit of cultural ignorance on my part.

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> If those who correct can’t or won’t explain why one is correct over the other, then it simply isn’t.

Or they aren't good at defending their position. Beware of people who are good at argument: they'll often seem to be right when they're not. Conversely, don't ignore someone just because they can't argue their point well. The point may have merit, even if they can't represent it as strongly as they should.

This is where the Hacker News guidelines about responding to the strongest possible interpretation of what somebody is saying come into play.

As a grammar and language Messerschmidt I hate how correct and elegant this is:

> If those who correct can’t or won’t explain why one is correct over the other, then it simply isn’t.

I will try to remember this and also execute it with kindness and trivia, like you suggest, in the future.

Thank you.

It's profoundly annoying that it's correct, isn't it! Every time I wince at reading something that feels wrong I have to remind myself that it’s ultimately only wrong because of convention.

(I do occasionally slip, and correct its/it's, your/you're or they're/their/there in someone's comment, but only if that comment is aggressively or nastily calling someone else stupid.)

> Less/fewer is probably a lost cause

When people correct less/fewer I always assume they are just making a Game of Thrones/Stannis Baratheon joke.

Which I will always support, even if the TV series drove off a cliff at the end.

Oh! If there is some running joke here that I missed then I stand admonished :-)

(Though it is a somewhat dangerous one to deploy without context)

Is there a clip? (I have neither the energy nor the streaming service to get into GoT)

> Oh! If there is some running joke here that I missed then I stand admonished

I actually don't even know if the person you replied to was making this joke, or if they were being sincere, I'm speculating... but...

> Is there a clip?

It was kind of a running joke on the show. Couldn't find a clip that encapsulates the whole thing, but the first clip here shows Stannis reflexively making the correction at various times as if it were like a tic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0zNWswcqMg

And then later in the series you see it rub off on the person he was with in the previous instances (in the 2nd scene in this clip):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXINZxodu9U

Thank you so much for this! Definitely seems likely I just missed out on the joke.

I would guess that this is sort of an embedded joke about the use of British regional language/accents as a world building framework? A brief google suggests it is not from the books.

I am of the age/schooling/class background where people make this reflexive correction entirely unironically. I know several older people who do this, and I remember the cultural campaigns over the “ten items or less” signs in supermarkets.

It is however allowable to correct grammar nits if done in the midst of a prison riot, as in The Naked Gun.

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