Less and fewer
I was always taught that the word 'less' was applied to quantities and 'fewer' to numbers.
For example:
"There is less water in a raindrop than in a lake"
but
"There are fewer than ten people on the bus"
Recently hower I've started hearing "less" used where I think "fewer" should be used. For example aisles marked "six items or less" and sentences about "less road deaths" on the BBC.
Is this rule being dropped now or are people who should know better just becoming sloppy or pandering to populism?
The dictionaries seem to say it is incorrect to use "less" for countable nouns.
Well, in real life, that's how people speak. Sometimes dictionaries aren't correct.
«The dictionaries seem to say it is incorrect to use "less" for countable nouns»
Only part of dictionaries, according to the link a have provided.
>>The dictionaries seem to say it is incorrect to use "less" for countable nouns.<<
That's a silly prescriptivist position that is not in line with actual usage in many if not most English dialects today.
In real life people are often wrong, for example saying "pacific" when they mean "specific" or spelling "bananas" as "banana's".
I agree with Travis. That "rule" against using "less" with countable nouns is absurd.
>>In real life people are often wrong, for example saying "pacific" when they mean "specific" or spelling "bananas" as "banana's".<<
The thing is that what you are speaking of here are fundamentally different matters than what the "less" matter is about. "Pacific" versus "specific" is a matter of misspeaking, and often people will correct themselves when they catch themselves in such cases. As for "bananas" versus "banana'", that is a matter of orthographic conventions, which have practically nothing to do with how people actually natively speak.
In contrast to both of those cases, "less" versus "fewer" is a matter of some sorts prescribing what is normal native usage for some section of the English-speaking world as being "incorrect" for whatever arbitrary reason. This one is in particular a case where very widespread usage contradicts what some prescriptivist sorts dictate as being "correct", as amongst large portions of the population, the only people who insist on "fewer" rather than "less" for countable nouns are the specific kind of people who would actually support this kind of thing i.e. people like pedants and English teachers and like. Of course, this excepting the (seemingly smaller) sections of such where such is a natively made distinction.
Nowadays I am hearing a bizarre sentence especially from British speakers on music channels. "I had the bestest time."
"The bestest??".. isn't it a wrong form used?
«In real life people are often wrong, for example saying "pacific" when they mean "specific" or spelling "bananas" as "banana's»
Dictionaries are written by people too. The difference is that the writers pretend to know what they are writing about. However, the criteria of correctness is something different: if the majority uses 'less' with countable nouns, why call it incorrect?
Oh dear, before you go about bashing dictionaries, remember that there still IS a distinction between colloquial and formal usage. Though it's all right to use "less" all the time in speech, there's still a formal distinction between "less" and "fewer" when you're writing your doctoral thesis!
>>Oh dear, before you go about bashing dictionaries, remember that there still IS a distinction between colloquial and formal usage. Though it's all right to use "less" all the time in speech, there's still a formal distinction between "less" and "fewer" when you're writing your doctoral thesis!<<
For just whom? If it is not being read by pedantic English profs, I doubt it really matters myself.
Oh no, I'm not saying it matters, but you really can't say that the dictionaries are wrong or silly, can you?
But when two dictionaries state opposite things, one of them should be considered incorrect (or less correct than the other...).