Of course the official rule is that for countable things, like apples, we say fewer, as in, “Why are there fewer apples?” And for things that you can’t really count, you use less, as in “We need more dream time and less screen time.”
But recently, even from native speakers who’ve been to university, you can hear people using ‘less’ when the grammar books say they should use ‘fewer’. Language changes and there are many examples of things that we say differently than we write. What are your thoughts?
Should we grammar nazi this until everyone gets back in line? Should we just let language evolve and enjoy the ride? Do you think it will settle in with spoken and written forms being different? Do you think this will become the norm in English?
By the way, I blame supermarkets with their “9 items or less” signs.
Any particular reason why this post is duplicated?
It didn’t appear to be processing and I F5ed it and started again. I think that was it.
I suspected that, happened to me too, when some Lemmy instances were overloaded. No biggie: if the two comments from the other duplicate are reposted here, I’ll delete that one; otherwise we leave it there.
I’ve found that it happens less often on Chrome than it does on the Brave browser.