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> “He means fewer water” or “She means less bottles.” This is wrong. “Fewer” is for quantities (i.e. countable things) whereas “less” is for a singular mass.
by steve_taylor 7y ago
> “He means fewer water” or “She means less bottles.”
This is wrong. “Fewer” is for quantities (i.e. countable things) whereas “less” is for a singular mass.
- valleyer 7y agoYou're missing the sarcasm. The full quote: > Thus on the rare occasions these adjectives are actually deployed accurately on TV, my husband and I will interject mischievously, “He means fewer water” or “She means less bottles.”
- nerdponx 7y agoApparently this was never a rule except in textbooks, like splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, typesetting ordinal suffixes ("th" etc) in superscript, and always putting punctuation inside of quotation marks.
- 333c 7y agoI'm confused what you mean. As a native speaker, these are definitely rules. As your parent comment says (missing the sarcasm of the article), these examples sound (and are) wrong.