Home Statistics and Visualization Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Where have all the count words gone? In defense of “fewer” and “among”

Where have all the count words gone? In defense of “fewer” and “among”

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science 2024-10-13

This is cranky linguist Bob.

The lack of count markers is starting to bug me. To wit…

Usage of “fewer” vs. “less”

The prescriptive rule in English is that “fewer” applies to groups of countable objects whereas “less” applies to uncountable masses. I’d say “many dogs” rather than “much dogs” because dogs are countable. Similarly, I’d say “fewer dogs” not “less dogs.” You can say “less water” but not “fewer water”, though you can say “fewer bottles of water” if you’re willing to introduce a partitive.

Usage of “among” vs. “between”

A similar prescriptive rule is that one uses “between” for two things and “among” for more than two. So it’s “between you and me” but “among the three of us”.

Kids these days

I’ve noticed that “fewer” and “among” are being used infrequently these days, at least in spoken language and language written by scientists. This is understandable as languages tend to evolve toward regularity. It’s just that I used to work on count nouns when I was studying natural language semantics and internalized the rules. So now I find it jarring to hear collocations that jumble the mass/count distinction. This must be how Francophones feel when a non-native speaker confuses the gender of a noun. I can’t stop my internal checksum from flashing an error code!

References

Yes, I’m human

The blog’s asked me so many times when writing this post that I feel I need to share.