Nitpicking is unkind. Saying that you're kind about nitpicking doesn't make you kind. If you want to be kind, I recommend not nitpicking.

Language is driven by users with skin in the game, not nitpickers with dictionaries. Word use and meaning will shift naturally over time. If I say less and, given the context, you understand it to mean few, then the mission was accomplished, the mission being communication. That you understood me is an example of word use/meaning shift in action. It happens.

Ok, my attempt at self deprecating humor didn't land. I don't actually correct anyone on this, I only make hacker news comments about it. But it won't stop standing out to me.

> not nitpickers with dictionaries.

And indeed, the writers of those dictionaries would be against the prescriptivist nitpicking, too.

Wasn't this rule made up by someone in the 18th century because he thought it sounded better [1]? Therefore, it's not even more correct to say fewer rather than less. The only reason to care about it is to stop people trying to correct your language usage.

[1] e.g. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/495/less-vs-fewe...

Never tried to claim it wasn't pedantic of me! Just one of those things that sticks, because it was taught to me that way.

It's almost like it's an unimportant distinction for normal speech and that the spoken language is moving on, as it inevitably does.

100% understand that. It's just something that's stuck with me for some reason.

Fair enough:)

It's also okay to have opinions about language of course. I just often see people confidently stating, that they're speak the right way, and those others (from that other city, country, those young people, those poor people, those black people, etc.) speak the wrong way. And it often boils down to either ignorance about how languages actual work and evolve, or just elitism/classism (or worse).

And as somebody who cares a lot about languages, this just rubs me the wrong way, and I see it so often. Hence my previous response, pardon the snark:)

It'd be one less thing to worry about ;)

At this point, the battle is over. Any remaining resistance in the "fewer" camp had a stake driven through its heart when Lin-Manuel Miranda used "That's one less thing to worry about" in one of the most popular musicals in a decade.

As Shakespeare showed, when you're a playwright, you can change the language.

Except that this was a common idiom long before Miranda used it.

Yes of course. The difference is that he has establishment clout. Anyone who is being called to task for "misusing English" can now just quote someone who's use of English grossed $807 million.

I've always thought that might be an interesting feature to have in an esoteric programming language - for floats you must use the 'less than' comparison, but for integers use the 'fewer than' comparison.

I like this better than SML/NJ's 'andalso' and 'orelse' because they'd already used 'and' and 'or' for bitwise logic computations and the language disallows function overloading.

i'm doing good thinking about it less times