Today's Grammar Lesson

[tealin]

I heard the Gardasil commercial for the first time today. You know, the one with all the females saying 'I want to be one less!' over and over and then all yelling it at the end?

IT'S ONE FEWER! ONE FEWER!! Aaargh!

Less/Fewer is the same rule as many/much. When do you say 'how many' and when 'how much'? If you can count it, you say many – 'How many eggs?' If you can't count it, it's much – 'How much water?' You don't say 'how many water' or 'how much eggs' because you know that sounds dumb. But people swap 'less' and 'fewer' at random, even though they follow the same rule. If you can count them, it's fewer: 'I need fewer problems' – and if you can't, it's less: 'More clouds mean less sunlight.'

Is this so hard? Please tell me why this is so hard. And you can't just blame it on the '15 items or less' checkout aisle at the grocery store, that's not good enough.

Comments

[brendanm720.livejournal.com]

Yes, people are pretty dumb. If it makes you feel any better, it wasn't until college that I finally found out that I wasn't supposed to use an apostrophe on acronym plurals (such as DVDs).

[shrug]

If the teachers can't get it right, how can the rest of us know what is correct?

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Dude, same here. Will they just get their story straight?

[anathelen.livejournal.com]

"If the teachers can't get it right, how can the rest of us know what is correct?"

My cousin is becoming an elementary school teacher and, having read her facebook profile and its various grammatical and spelling atrocities, I want to shake her and ask, "How can you teach children? How?! You don't know the difference between 'your' and 'you're'!"

I suspect many kids just aren't taught grammar these days - I know I didn't learn much besides the basics. I muddled through high school French and then got my arse kicked when I took Ancient Greek and Latin in college.

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

We aren't taught proper grammar in English class, we really aren't. Speaking as a grade 12 student, I've found all throughout high school that the teachers have just sort of assumed that we can all use correct grammar, and indeed at this point we should be. But elementary teachers... I dunno, maybe they thought we'd just sort of absorb everything from the atmosphere, like word osmosis or something. They just kind of skimmed through everything grammatical and then moved onto the book-reading part, which is probably more fun for teachers. But it royally screwed the slower people, who are making some grammatical errors in grade 12 University Prep courses that should, and could, have been quashed in grade 5. It doesn't help that a frighteningly significant amount of kids don't read much, so they can't even learn through context.

Sometimes I wonder whether elementary school education is worth the paper all those textbooks are printed on. Although the finger painting in kindergarten was pretty fun, at least. 8D

[azvolrien.livejournal.com]

I did a practice reading paper for Higher English recently. One of the questions was "Show how the context gives you the meaning of the word 'bizarre'." When we were going over it, I asked "If you're good enough to be doing Higher English, shouldn't you already know what 'bizarre' means!?". I mean, 'bizarre'? I could understand it for a different paper (when the word in question was 'Armageddon' - after all, it's probably just a film to most people) but 'bizarre'?