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Fewer.
Recently I’ve started to think that these and other similar battles are lost.
It just feels so petty. Not a single person reading “less cops” was confused by its meaning. I get fighting against misuse of your/you’re, its/it’s, etc. because they can make things harder to read. Fewer and less, though, have the exact same underlying meaning (a reduction).
Your write. Choose you’re battle wisely
I’m something of a grammar Nazi, but just like I support letting “whom” die, “less” and “fewer” might as well just be interchangeable. There’s no loss of language utility in doing so, unlike “literally”'s tragic demise.
Ah don’t let whom die. It’s a really good lesson in subject vs object.
Literally has been used for emphasis, hyperbole, and metaphor since at least the late 18th century.
I’m aware, but it was done so sparingly, as opposed to being used to mean its opposite far more than its original meaning nowadays.
That is how language works. It starts off small, then it catches on over time, and after a long time has passed, it either gets filtered out, or it becomes commonly used. The case for literally being used, for reasons other than its original one, started a couple hundred years ago. Today it is super commonly used that way, as it didn’t get abandoned. You are mad at the nature of the beast.
I thought it meant cops should lose weight so there’s less of them overall.
This one isn’t even real. “Fewer” can only refer to countable things, but “less” can refer to both countable and uncountable things, and has been used that way for hundreds of years. It has never been wrong to say “less.”
They aren’t “lost”, because they were never yours to be “fighting” in the first place…
I’m a grammar loving curmudgeon. Even I check myself more often than not after I realized the kind of classist tones that come through when arguing against lexicon.
Me trying to get people to say they “are doing well” not “doing good” when asked “how are you doing?”
Tracy Jordan says it best in 30 Rock -“No, Superman does good. You’re doing well.”
“I’m doing goodly.”
Eh, I’ll take it
What if you caught me in the middle of doing good works?
Language prescriptivism is a useless endeavour, let the language evolve as it wants, I personally don’t mind the use of less in this situation
I actually kind of disagree in this context. Less is sharper and more readable while conveying the same meaning. The grammar books might say it’s technically incorrect, but I think it was the right word to use here.
Ahh, I went on a rant about this, and someone already did it for me much more concisely.
Yeah, they used less words
It took fewer time, too.
Why?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/fewer-vs-less
Essentially, fewer is normally used for discrete numbers of things (e.g. “fewer apples”, “fewer boats”, or “fewer cops”) while less is used for amounts (e.g. “less water”, “less sand”, or “less money”).
As noted in the above link, there are exceptions. However, the exceptions listed are all with “than” or “or” added. Specifically, it’s pointing put that while “fewer items” is correct, “3 items or less” is also considered correct.
In the case of the sign, it is referring to the specific number of officers in the city, so it should use “fewer”. Does it matter? No, not really. Why did I bother saying anything? I got a chance to rep grammar and quote Stannis Baratheon at the same time.
Good to know. Thanks
I would say it’s “fewer” not “less”, but every time I do, I get a lecture and downvoted.
Even though this time it’s quite clearly a case where “fewer” is the proper choice as “cop” is most definitely a countable noun (yes, I know there are exceptions, this is generally not one.)
Bring on the downvotes.
I agree with the sentiment.
Literal grammar police.
ACAB.
The thin red line
? That’s usually a reference to British soldiers especially during the musket era. What’s it mean here?
it’s a joke that a lot of people copyedit or mark students’ work in red pen, a pun on the thin X line, a(n arguably risible) belief that those in a particular uniform are the only thing keeping society intact.
The squiggly line that spell check draws
Uberunder misspelled wordsIt draws under words usually, not über them
You wanted a lecture, here you go:
You can use less for countable nouns, any of them. We’ve been doing it for literally centuries. In fact, it has never been used only for uncountable nouns (unlike fewer, which has generally only been used for countable nouns). Correct language is determined by what native speakers use on purpose, not what a textbook or teacher says.
At least read the Wikipedia and the dictionary if you want to keep a strong opinion about this:
However, modern linguistics has shown that idiomatic past and current usage consists of the word less with both countable nouns and uncountable nouns so that the traditional rule for the use of the word fewer stands, but not the traditional rule for the use of the word less. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, "Less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted.”
OK, so I’m a prescriptivist and don’t agree. As mentioned in the paragraph before the one you quoted. Should we just let any old thing that slips into common usage to become the norm? Why not spell it “definately”? It’s very common and everyone understands it.
I’m all for evolving language, but the fewer words we use, the less elegant it becomes. IMO of course.
Should we just let any old thing that slips into common usage to become the norm?
Yes.
Why not spell it “definately”? It’s very common and everyone understands it.
I don’t think that quite meets the threshold yet, since most people who do that would still agree that it’s not correct. However, it’s close, and I wouldn’t be against recording it as an alternative spelling.
It’s a bit tangential, but English spelling is awful anyway, it bears hardly any relationship to the pronunciation, and I think it’s great if it evolves to be a bit less unintuitive.
I suppose you probably do accept the existence of American spellings, even if you aren’t from there? So the only difference between us is time, and how many people use a variant. Everyone is a descriptivist, some people just also think they should force their opinions on others, which is wrong. ;)
Common usage the the norm are literally the same thing.
Prescriptivists act like ‘the norm’ is some ordained perfection and everything in their own lifetime is an aberration, but that’s just temporal exceptionalism. Do you really think you just happened to be born at a time when the people writing style guides pointed at the be all the all of the English language and all advances are just corruption?
Hey man, do you want to be grammatically correct, or do you want to speak clearly to people who want to be a cop? Sometimes you have to make a choice.
Haha! Fair enough.
Less cops --> Fewer racism
Less cops
Fewer racism
Very better society
Wow!
no downvotes on blahaj
You can count numbers but they use < in maths. QED.
Oh, you mean the “fewer than” symbol? (Some people do call it that.)
You can count numbers? How many are there?
At least 7
You can’t be downvoted because this is on blåhaj.
Does lol have downvoting? Because, for some weird federation thing, I can definitely downvote and see others having been downvoted if their instance allows downvotes. Here, have a downvote. :D
You can only see downvotes from people on your instance. To get to other instances, they have to go through blahaj lemmy, and it just ignores them
Yes, lemy.lol has downvotes.
And no, I don’t see them here.
Well when you have 81,000 gallons of cops you need less cops for sure. I think the sign is right.
I can’t tell if you made this example randomly, or were actually present for the last discussion of this exact same thing. Either way, it’s pretty funny. How many gallons in your average cop? They look pretty voluminous in general.
100% funded by the fire department lmao
Actually? Because good! Cops try and act like they’re an emergency service, like they’re first responders, when they’re not. So it’s good to hear some firies and ambos pushing back against that, all too often cops buddy up to them.
Don’t know if it was, but firemen tend to dislike police. I am also getting the idea EMT are getting to that point now. Close friends of the family have been in both of these fields for a long time. They, and all their friends, from their prospective work, feel derision for police. The firemen openly mocked them as long as I knew them, and the EMTs have been getting less, and less, friendly with the police in the last decade.
I was at my first rodeo a few weeks back and there was a tug of war between the cops and firemen. The cops won but they had an extra guy and somehow their huge anchor person at the back was twice as fat as the biggest fire guy. I don’t know how a 450-500 pound guy is a cop.
I can tell you how that guy is a cop. He started off meeting physical requirement however, after he had been there for years, he either was injured, or something, that put him on permanent desk duty, and ballooned up, but it doesn’t matter now, he is on desk duty forever. That or he had been there for years, and became obese over that time, but had enough seniority they just stuck him with an admin/desk job until he retires.
Don’t worry about getting confused. It WAS your first rodeo, after all.
Only in america, cops would not be regarded AS first responders lmaoo
I don’t know what part of the world you’re in, but where I am, cops absolutely are referred to as first responders.
One actually showed up at my friends place just a few weeks back, and the complete bloody chucklefuck did CPR on her even though she was breathing.
They also notoriously give narcan for literally anything lol
I don’t completely blame them, considering it’s one of the only anti drug drugs that they can administer, but like not everyone who’s unresponsive is confirmed opioid overdose.
Friend, I have done Advanced First Aid before where I live. I’ve refreshed the CPR component many times. Which is the best case for that officer in question’s qualifications. The thing with narcan is that, it’s not great if you don’t need it, but it won’t kill you. However, and you’re taught this in CPR training, if you perform it on someone who isn’t in cardiac arrest, you can cause them to go into cardiac arrest. He literally could have killed her.
is ambo actually a thing people say? that’s so funny
Yes, that is actually a thing people say here in Australia. We don’t have “EMTs” here, they’re called Ambulance Officers, and that sounds kinda wanky, so we just say Ambo. It’s as widely-used here as Cop is for Police Officer.
By and large, you probably think it sounds funny bc it does in ur accent and I’d be laughing my arse off at you ☺️
Nobody wrote a song called Fuck the Fire Department. Except this guy. And it’s amazing.
Funny enough, a few months ago, I took a photo of the same poster.
You generally need a Master’s degree to become a librarian.
Less cops. More people with higher education.
Wish it was free
Don’t be worse than Russia. Please fix.
I need to go back to college, man
Yes. The poster is encouraging people to do better.
Lmao, you need a fucking masters to catalogue and check out books to local schoolchildren but you don’t need it to be trusted with a badge and a gun.
We’re so fucked dude.
Edit: Mentioned in reply to another comment, but sorry for making librarians sound like they don’t do much. My point wasn’t that they’re not important, my point was that they don’t make life or death decisions for random members of the community on the daily.
You are dramatically underestimating the responsibilities and skill set of a librarian.
I don’t doubt that. Handling large groups of kids, especially in the summer when they’ve got nowhere else to go, all while keeping a vital resource to the community alive.
Admittedly that was a shitty way to paint librarians, so sorry about that.
That being said, a bad cop can do a lot more damage to a community than a bad librarian.
Actually to be a school librarian you only need a bachelor’s of education focusing in something IT-related, plus whatever teaching cert your state requires. And in public libraries, you also only need a bachelor’s in information science to be a library tech, which is the one that stocks the shelves and checks out books to local schoolchildren. Only being a full librarian needs a Master’s. That said, academic libraries won’t even look at you if you have less than a Master’s.
focusing in something IT-related
Ok, how? IT-librarian? I can belive in IT-related assistant, but librarian? In school? Where I live they usually have degree in pedagogy.
a library tech,
Ah. Nvm. I thought you said about only librarians.
IT stands for Information Technology. Library Science is a subset of IT.
Why master’s? But you WILL need a degree. Bachelor in Library Science, alternatively Pedagogy or Philology.
It may seem odd, but librarians are pre-internet search engine. You tell them “I want I don’t know what, but something like that and that” and they point where to find such information.
Librarians need to be trusted to do research to work in most private and academic libraries. So public libraries just follow the trend. Private librarians tend to focus on organizing databases, since they generally work with computer archives instead of books. Academic libraries do literature reviews, where they read large amounts of research on a subject and then summarize everything they’ve learned.
Most librarians hop between these fields a few times, and it can be very jarring to adjust to each sytem.
Fewer cops, not less cops.
Less pedants
You can do betterYet you have no problem with “wanna?”
More help and less authoritarian violence!
Fewer authoritarian violence.
So, you wanna be on the top Harassin’ and shootin’ all the kids on the block Incarcerate the youth of the next generation And you’ll get the high-fives at the police station
Thank you, I had to scroll way too far to find a Morning Glory reference.
bep?
Better. Eattle.
ool nurses.
rarians.
MTs.
S.
So you be wanna be p? a cop?
