Long Term Memories
Saturday, February 24, 2007
  Less vs Fewer

My father was a fan of good word usage. I remember that he would, on occasion, praise some speaker as being a proficient user of the English Language (I think my father supported Adlai Stevenson for President in the 50s for this reason but I'm not sure). One of my father's favorite misuses to correct involved people saying 'less' when they should say 'fewer'.

I was thinking of this today because we had a guest who frequently makes the 'less' vs fewer mistake but is a very nice person. I remember once I had a meeting with a Secretary of Transportation who I remember impressed me for about 20 minutes because his small talk was nice and he correctly used the word 'fewer' when others might have used 'less'. However, once the Secretary got to discussed substantive matters, I was appalled at his poor grasp of the issues he was supposed to be in charge of.

Basically, I don't have the same sensibility as my father on this.

Coincidentally my father also disliked the phrase "very unique" since it was redundant. George used this phrase today and objected to my objection. His reasoning was that the phrase should not be taken literally and thus to say 'very unique' only means 'very rare'.

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  8:52 PM
Martin's memories preceding the chronicles, i.e., before 1986. The reason for this blog is to capture old memories that come back to me at seemingly random times. Thus the entries will not be in chronological order. Also, the accuracy of this blog is less than the accuracy in the more contemporaneous blog http://weisschronicles.blogspot.com/

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