Reddit mentions of Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage

> fewer

I know you (and /u/smokeycoughlin) are just being a smart aleck to a known troll, but, if you'll indulge me, the supposedly steadfast rule you're referring to — "fewer" for discrete things, "less" for continuous things — isn't really borne out in the language as it's been used for hundreds of years. It's true that "fewer" only applies to things that can be counted, but there's no God- or William Safire-given principle of symmetry at play in the language that disqualifies "less" in the same circumstance, no rule that says YOU MUST SELECT EXACTLY ONE OF LESS OR FEWER. Less is more — that is, "less" can refer both to counted and continuous things, and this has been the case for centuries, both among ordinary people and considered, admirable writers.

Here are some quotes from the relevant entry in Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage:

>The OED shows that less has been used of countables since the time of King Alfred the Great—he used it that way in one of his own translations from Latin—more than a thousand years ago (in about 888). So essentially less has been used of countables in English for just about as long as there has been a written English language. After about 900 years Robert Baker opined that fewer might be more elegant and proper. Almost every usage writer since Baker has followed Baker's lead, and generations of English teachers have swelled the chorus. The result seems to be a fairly large number of people who now believe less used of countables to be wrong, though its standardness is easily demonstrated.

The entry goes on to list some examples of "less" for countables in reputable writing, and also a bevy of cases where "less" feels more natural than "fewer," even though the quantities under discussion are countable:

>The odometer showed less than ten thousand miles.
>—E.L. Doctorow, Loon Lake, 1979

>I was never in Europe for less than fourteen months at a time.
>—James Thurber, letter, 18 July 1952

>"I've known you less than twenty-four hours."
>—Agatha Christie, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, 1934

"Less" also feels more natural than fewer in constructions such as "no less than" (30 senators did whatever) or phrases like "twenty-five words or less" or "one less tragedy." Substituting "fewer" there sounds stiff and artificially pompous.

Anyway, that's a meta-pet-peeve of mine, a pet peeve about other people's pet peeves, and maybe an interesting learning experience? Language is a woolly mess of competing conventions, not a rule-bound algorithm that lends itself to scorekeeping. The people trying to force the "less/fewer" dichotomy convention are operation under a misapprehension — one that rises to the level of a superstition, I think. Unless you're (1) bound to a particular house style whose holy book proscribes less/fewer intermingling, or (2) aspiring to be a grumpy grandpa who writes curmudgeonly letters to grocery store corporations expressing his strenuous disapproval regarding the express checkout lane signage, I don't think it's a superstition worth fighting for.

Whew! What a rant, I should go back to work now.