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Other than in a tongue-in-cheek manner or by the occasional inveterate prescriptivist, neither variation is considered poor spelling.
by BjoernKW 4y ago
Other than in a tongue-in-cheek manner or by the occasional inveterate prescriptivist, neither variation is considered poor spelling.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoIndubitably
- rprospero 4y agoI was once angrily told off by a professor from the other side of the ocean for referring to “less data” instead of “fewer data”. He absolutely would have marked off an applicant for making that comment on their resume. I still defend that a single datapoint whose uncertainty is a real number is an inherently uncountable value and that “less data” was the appropriate phrasing.
- denysvitali 4y agoThis is just worse than being a grammar nazi IMHO. It's not even about being correct - both representations are OK. If we're really nit-picking, we can say that the language is shaped by the people speaking it, and thus Google Trend could be a good starting point: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Less%20data,Fewer%20data https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Less%20data,Fewer... It seems like "less data" is far more common. But again, we're nit-picking, and this is taking my initial post to the extreme limit. If he would have marked off an applicant for such a thing, he really shouldn't evaluate CVs in the first place, as he would be doing some kind of gatekeeping towards people with the exact same "ideals".