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Posts Tagged ‘grammar’

  1. Ah, yes…

    February 8, 2009 by dafyd

    So, when I said that I’d be blogging more frequently, it looks like I lied. Sorry about that. No real excuse – just didn’t have anything to say.

    I’ve still not got a proper job, seven months after graduating, which is incredibly frustrating. I’ve been doing odd bits of freelance website work, which keeps me busy, but I don’t think counts as a job, and certainly isn’t what I wanted to be doing. Lots of applications, lots of rejections, lots of not hearing anything at all. Most frustrating? Being told that you’re “over qualified” or would “feel restricted by the role”. Frankly, I don’t care – I just want to work!

    Still, light at the end of the tunnel, and all that: there’s a 50-50 chance that I’ll end up in the States, where there’s an even bigger jobs market in which to not find work. I’m also seriously tempted to take a PGCE – teaching seems to tick all the boxes on my “what I want from a job” list, and they pay you to train, so that may be what I’m doing next year if the dates work out. I’ll keep you posted.

    In the meantime, a snippet from an email I received from East Midlands Trains. Seems they need to revise the difference between “less” and “fewer”…

    EMT less-fewer confusion

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  2. Less grammar. More driving pleasure.

    August 24, 2008 by dafyd

    I just caught this BMW advert, narrated by Donald Sutherland, during the Grand Prix:

    Pretty advert, sure, but it’s that last card, the tagline, that annoys me. Any GCSE student – let alone a copywriter at a major agency, working on a huge campaign for a massive client – could tell you that you can’t say “less emissions”. It should be “fewer emissions”, as “emissions” is a countable noun. I’d be perfectly happy with “less gunk emitted”. Even “less gas” would be fine. But absolutely not “less emissions”.

    That said, Fowler says that

    less can be idiomatically used with plural nouns when these denote something closer to an amount than a numerical quantity, as with distances, periods of time, ages, and sums of money: less than 5 miles to go | less than six weeks | children less than three years old | less than £100

    In this context, I suppose, “emissions” is denoting the total amount of gunk being emitted, so this could, feasibly, be correct. I’m not convinced, though – it just seems sloppy to me, using ungrammatical English to fit the meter of the tagline.

    The Engine Room (a blog about language, not cars) has an interesting discussion about the same thing…

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