What is wrong with the following sentance (from nzherald.co.nz):
Lower voter turnout and less women MPs.
I'm getting increasingly annoyed by the lazy grammar, on TV as well as in the news. TV3News used "less" where "fewer" was correct the other day.
Less is where you can't count it. (there is less water in the glass)
Fewer is when you can count it. (there are fewer millilitres of water in the glass)
Who is when the reply is he (Who is the boss?; he is the boss)
Whom is when the reply is him (With whom shall I speak?; You should speak with him)
This morning I woke up at 0030 and have not been able to get back to sleep. It's now 0413 so I suppose I may as well just stay up until late morning and go back to bed then. Fingers crossed - usually I can't sleep well in the daytime.
I wish I could fast-foward time by a few days. That's what I like about general anaesthetic - it's the closest thing to time-travel we can get at the moment. The body experiences that time but to our minds, it is seamless - from morning til mid-afternoon, it's as if that time never happened to us.
Famous Last Words
Spade Cooley, speaking to friends backstage about his come-back prospects after being released from prison for the murder of his wife:
"I think it's gonna work out for me," he said. "I have the feeling that today is the first day of the rest of my life."
The smile suddenly left his face. He dropped his fiddle, grimaced, clutched his chest and fell dead at 59 years of age. - crimelibrary.com
And More On The Infamous Side
Tom Quick, American Pioneer, boasted that he had killed 99 Munsee Indians in his lifetime (well, it was over 200 years ago):
And now, as he lay dying, he had one last request.
"Bring me one more Indian," he is said to have asked, "so I can make it an even 100." - crimelibaray.com
And A Theological Tangle
When they play religion programs on TV, and they're repeats - taped from the States or whatever - do the prayers get counted again by god? Because if they do, it would seem that the easiest way to get the almighty's attention would be to play an endlessly looping tape of your request. Or do prayers only count when they're live?
Posted by phreq at July 22, 2005 05:17 AM | TrackBackI think the less/fewer distinction is doomed - my partner is a teacher, and read the kids a sentence containing the word fewer for a spelling test - none of them knew what he meant until he substituted the word 'less' for 'fewer' in the sample sentence.....
It irritates me when people use less incorrectly instead of fewer... I keep trying to tell myself that's it just evolution of language...
Posted by: Janet at July 22, 2005 12:04 PMi would prefer time travel where you have experiences but you body does not age.
on a related topic, in the way that most of the population of the southern states is related, i heard a classic btw news piece: 'there is a famine in niger'...
did anyone hear about this until last week? don't these things take time to develop? i hate the media.
phreq, have you noticed the media increasingly using words like 'probably'? if i want hearsay or guesswork i'll go to a blog ;)
The media is getting lighter and lighter in investigative or even unbiased (eg, Fox) journalism and more centralised I think. A lot of the footage on the evening news and in the papers is from overseas - BBC, CNN, AP, Reuters. The same story I read in detail in the NY Times in the morning turns up a sensationalist "human interest" peice on the evening news.
I would like to see some even-handed, balanced, non-sensationalist, non-lite, non-dumbed-down debate and the only place I can find it is on the radio. Kiwi breakfast show has some good interviews.
Cambell Live promised to answer the questions that I want answered but so far only about 3 epidsodes have dealt with anything that could be remotely described as "hard news".
Read the NY Times and the Guardian. But beware the Opinion pages, Dowd has come in for a lot of bias allegations.
Just read my blog, for all the biased hysteria you need.
Yep, less and fewer gets my goat too.
But there is worse to come: at my other job I'm going to have to insist on an "English language" policy...
e: "D'd ya get that ema'l from Tony?"
me: "Yes, I got it. (pause) But I didn't understand it."
e: "Bu' tha's wot I ment!"
me: "Oh,... sorry, I received it but did not understand a lot of it, because he only told me half the story!"
Sometimes I wonder. Mostly I just shake my head in disgust.
It must be Winter.
Posted by: phil at July 26, 2005 10:14 PMHeh :) A mate of mine went over to the States and found that in the South, the accent is so heavy that they think someone speaking English with a Kiwi accent is speaking a foreign language.
The way round it? Make fun of a Southern accent!
Posted by: phreq at July 28, 2005 11:03 AMWhile visiting a friend in California, we visited the Yacumba hot springs on the boarder with Mexico. The young girl at the local superette (age... i guess 12-13ish) figured out I wasn't a local and asked where I was from. "New Zealand." Blank look. "Ok, you know where Australia is?" Another blank look. Deep breath, "Ooookay,... you know where South America is." Yet another blank look...
It was later explained to me, that world geography isn't taught until high school. I suspect this *might* just have a bearing on how threatened some Americans seem to feel by "The Rest of The World."
Posted by: phil at July 28, 2005 07:58 PMKeep a good work man!
Posted by: Arnie at March 7, 2006 01:51 PM