I spent Labor Day weekend at a grown-up camp for world-music singers in northern Vermont, a happy retreat to the only thing I ever liked about camp, which was all the group sings after dinner. The rude toilet stalls by the women’s cabins had the usual country warnings about flushing sanitary products, cautioning that doing so “will not only mean more work for the maintenance crew, but will also mean one less toilet for you to use until it is fixed.”
I had been mulling over my recent wrist-slapping by a commenter for having written that I’d used “a fair amount of unfamiliar words” in my forthcoming novel, when of course the words were countable. To me, in that instance, the choice was aesthetic; the preponderance of unfamiliar words felt as if it took up a certain volume in the book (a volume that was unnaturally enhanced by italicizing the words), and so amount felt more appropriate than number. But I got to thinking about this prescriptivist distinction, and the signs on the doors of the women’s stalls pushed that thought further.
Certainly the toilets are countable; that’s part of the point of the warning. But to write one fewer toilet feels unnatural, since fewer seems to want to modify a plural noun. Writing one fewer toilets feels unnatural because one obviously modifies a singular, and anyway, you have the need to reference the it that follows in the subordinate clause. The formal solution would be to write one toilet fewer—but somehow, in a stall in a women’s bathroom in the woods, with daddy longlegs and mosquitoes roaming the showers, that diction seems out of place.
Aside from simply wanting to distinguish between the countable and the noncountable, why do we make this less/fewer distinction when we use more for either increased number or increased quantity? I ran through a number of different phrasings as I meandered from one singing group to the next (Lithuanian, Corsican, South African, Appalachian). Very few instances of so-called misuse, as far as I could tell, resulted in misunderstanding. Less people than expected were at the concert is clear in its meaning, as is the ubiquitous 10 items or less. (I don’t think fewer is ever “improperly” employed, e.g., I drink fewer milk than I used to, so I’m not going there.)
The only examples I could come up with wherein the less/fewer distinction made a true difference employed an intervening adjective. For instance, if I say, “We’ve had less happy vacations since he passed away,” we’ve probably taken the same number of vacations but have not enjoyed them as much as we formerly did; whereas “We’ve had fewer happy vacations since he passed away” may mean the same number of vacations with some miserable ones sprinkled in; or it may mean fewer vacations, happy though they may have been.
Make it “We’ve had less good times together since you left,” and the odd combination of less good makes the distinction more ambiguous. Was the missing person such a lynchpin that the group no longer gathers now that he’s away? Or do they gather but then squabble? Hard to say.
Of course, I’m giving these examples in isolation. In reality, context would usually clarify what’s meant. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage seems to agree, at least where one less occurs. But as other distinctions die away (different from versus different than for instance), tiny slivers of difference die away with them. Except for the kind of examples I’ve listed, I can’t see where the disappearance of the less/fewer distinction entails such a difference. Can you?