this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
-3 points (28.6% liked)
English usage and grammar
450 readers
1 users here now
A community to discuss and ask questions about English usage and grammar.
If your post refers to a specific English variant, please indicate it within square brackets (for instance [Canadian]).
Online resources:
- Cambridge English Dictionary
- Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus
- Gilman's Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. This is a great and witty reference about usage, its history, and its controveries
Sibling communities:
Rules of conduct:
The usual ones on Lemmy and Mastodon.. In short: be kind or at least respectful, no offensive language, no harassment, no spam.
(Icon: entry "English" in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1933. Banner: page from Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale".)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, I could imagine the word "fewer" disappearing from the english language over the next century or so.
But as you already said, language is always changing, there's no point in trying to hold on to the "right" way to say anything. As long as you can understand what the other person is saying, the language is fulfilling its purpose.
Plus, people don't usually like having their language corrected. Doing so only leads to people disliking you, and for what? It's fighting windmills.
I hope it disappears from the language, these kind of words just add more friction when learning the language.
Having fewer words in the vocabulary will cause the language to be less difficult to learn ;)