It's fewer, fewer, fewer, fewer!

Apparently there is a supermarket in Cambridge with an aisle for '10 items or fewer.'
Well, it is Cambridge after all.

I used to say to my children that it was “less than one, fewer than two”. I also used to tell them to leave out apostrophes if they were unsure. Better none at all than one in the wrong place.

Claremont

I couldn't care fewer, lol.

I admit my grammar is abysmal.

Less and fewer, affect and effect and so many things confuse me.

I asked my husband to explain, one more time. He said 'well, what did the Nuns teach?' 'It made no sense, I quit school and married you.'

Wise choice.

DaisyAnneReturns

RosiesMawagain

It does seem that some people don't get passed the "drilling" at Primary School

Purely in the interests of accuracy and it IS Pedants’ Corner, presumably you meant past ?

I did but then I do have a low opinion of Primary School pedantry so you can probably expect mistakes while my brain is off eleswhere.

Thank you for pointing it out though RosiesMawagain

Why is teaching correct grammar or spelling denigrated as PromarySchool “pedantry”?
Does the same judgement apply to eg arithmetic?
5x6 = whatever you want it to be?
History?
Henry VI had 8 wives?
Geography?
The capital of Spain is Berlin?
Or language? Remember the paediatrician who was hounded out of his house accused of being a “paedophile”
What’s so smart about dumb?

Typo- Primary School

Countable and uncountable nouns - for example… less rice, sugar, flour etc. are uncountable- you can have 3 spoons of rice etc or 3 grains of rice but not 3 rice, there’s uncountable. Countable nouns - chairs, desks, tables - therefore countable so ‘fewer’.

Cabbie21

It grates when Danny, an expert and presenter on Bargain Hunt says “ You was”. Does the BBC have no standards these days?

In " A place in the sun" the presenters always say

" I'm sat here with Beverley and Colin .....

You ain't sat there, mate.

Drives me crackers when Alexander Armstrong says e.g. "You need 24 or less!!!" He's supposed to be very well-educated too.

Sorry, meant to say that AA presents Pointless every day at 5 15 on BbC1 for anyone who likes to shout at the telly!

Also people that, instead of people who….

RosiesMawagain

DaisyAnneReturns

RosiesMawagain

It does seem that some people don't get passed the "drilling" at Primary School

Purely in the interests of accuracy and it IS Pedants’ Corner, presumably you meant past ?

I did but then I do have a low opinion of Primary School pedantry so you can probably expect mistakes while my brain is off eleswhere.

Thank you for pointing it out though RosiesMawagain

Why is teaching correct grammar or spelling denigrated as PromarySchool “pedantry”?
Does the same judgement apply to eg arithmetic?
5x6 = whatever you want it to be?
History?
Henry VI had 8 wives?
Geography?
The capital of Spain is Berlin?
Or language? Remember the paediatrician who was hounded out of his house accused of being a “paedophile”
What’s so smart about dumb?

I think you misunderstood RosiesMawagain. I should have made this clearer. I wasn’t denigrating primary school teaching.

All of us will have gone on to at least secondary-level education and therefore had the opportunity to move beyond that initial teaching by building on it. Primary concepts are revisited through a spiral curriculum, where they are progressively formalised and extended in secondary education. What is taught in primary school is not replaced, but redefined, extended, and formalised in secondary school.

For that reason, I applaud the primary school teachers who taught so well, providing foundational knowledge that has stayed with us ever since. However, castigating others for not adhering to primary-level information that has since become irrelevant to their lives seems unkind and certainly unnecessary. It is those who are the authors of "primary school pedantry"

All of us will have gone on to at least secondary-level education and therefore had the opportunity to move beyond that initial teaching by building on it. Primary concepts are revisited through a spiral curriculum, where they are progressively formalised and extended in secondary education. What is taught in primary school is not replaced, but redefined, extended, and formalised in secondary school

Thank you for the Ladybird guide to education.
As a retired HoD I’d never have guessed..

RosiesMawagain

^All of us will have gone on to at least secondary-level education and therefore had the opportunity to move beyond that initial teaching by building on it. Primary concepts are revisited through a spiral curriculum, where they are progressively formalised and extended in secondary education. What is taught in primary school is not replaced, but redefined, extended, and formalised in secondary school^

Thank you for the Ladybird guide to education.
As a retired HoD I’d never have guessed..

🤣🤣🤣

My explanation was simply that my original post seemed to have been misunderstood RosiesMawagain. Online, credentials and former roles aren’t always visible, and they’re not really the point anyway.

The key part of my post was this:

For that reason, I applaud the primary school teachers who taught so well, providing foundational knowledge that has stayed with us ever since. However, castigating others for not adhering to primary-level information that has since become irrelevant to their lives seems unkind and certainly unnecessary. It is this tendency that I would describe as “primary school pedantry”.

Doodledog

I explained the 'less/fewer' rule to my children by telling them they could have less mashed potato or fewer chips. They still remember that.

I don't think it's taught at school these days. I often had to explain to students, many of whom had good grades in English at A level, and it tended to be the ones who spoke English as an additional language who had been taught the rule. I suspect that means the differential usage is dying out.

Some of these things have become markers of a particular style of education - often an old-fashioned one. They used to be a marker of a 'top-stream' pupil, which is maybe why many older people set so much store by them? Incorrect usage jumps out at me, but I don't think my children would notice, even though they do know the difference between the amount of mash and the number of chips .

I don't think it's about 'standards', so much as another way in which the language is shifting, as it has done for centuries.

I explained the 'less/fewer' rule to my children by telling them they could have less mashed potato or fewer chips. They still remember that.
😂

I'm wondering what their answer was to that!

"More mashed potato, or more chips, please Mum!"

primary-level information that has since become irrelevant to their lives seems unkind and certainly unnecessary

Are the basics of literacy, numeracy and - for want of a better word- general knowledge no longer relevant in our adult lives?
And would you therefore consider this whole thread on “less/fewer” in the same light? ( Unkind and certainly unnecessary )

They are the foundations on which future learning and communication in the world are built.
We all know what happens to buildings with dodgy foundations.
For what it is worth, I have noted that the mis-spellings, mis-speaking, or grammatical anomalies in the Epstein files are invariably followed by (sic) which shows that somebody spotted them.
.

RosiesMawagain

^primary-level information that has since become irrelevant to their lives seems unkind and certainly unnecessary^

Are the basics of literacy, numeracy and - for want of a better word- general knowledge no longer relevant in our adult lives?
And would you therefore consider this whole thread on “less/fewer” in the same light? ( Unkind and certainly unnecessary )

They are the foundations on which future learning and communication in the world are built.
We all know what happens to buildings with dodgy foundations.
For what it is worth, I have noted that the mis-spellings, mis-speaking, or grammatical anomalies in the Epstein files are invariably followed by (sic) which shows that somebody spotted them.
.

This is a case of quote mining that results in a straw-man argument. You then seem follow up with a response to a claim I never made.

I'm really don't feel obliged to converse with someone who’s performing rather than listening RosiesMawagain

Oo-er, I’ve been gransplained 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

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whywhywhy

There are people dying in the world and you’re all MOANING about a few words. Whoopeedo!!!

So tedious and boring but it presumably satisfies some weird superiority complex for some people.

Perhaps if the world leaders had concentrated on learning and understanding the development of language and speaking more than one language there wouldn't be violence and wars.

DaisyAnneReturns

Did you really teach our children?

Is questioning my professional integrity appropriate in this context?

Well, yes. You’ve taken a small part of what I said and built a response around that, rather than engaging with the point as a whole.

Given that you’re a teacher, I’m interested in how that kind of selective reading would be treated if a student did the same thing in an exam or piece of coursework.

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Unless it's Saint James the Less.