"What you can’t do is measure time itself, like counting the number of times that have passed since a certain thing happened."
Oh yeah?
Then why does my mom always ask: "Daniel! How many times have I told you to stop leaving Substack comments that intentionally misinterpret the original intent of a point someone makes?!"?
I cannot think of any reason for this disparity other than that we wanted to be more precise and clear when using fewer or less, but not on the other side.
A fun fact. When I moved to the US and got my first few haircuts, I said, please do not make my hair short (which generally meant about 3-4” of hair left in my country of birth). I quickly realized that I have to be precise, like saying cut 1”; otherwise, the outcome would be very different as the word short is relative. For some, it could be a 1” cut. For others, it was a 2-3” cut before they considered it as not short—one of the several things I had to change or learn to be more effective or get what I wanted.
That's a neat example with the haircut. I still don't quite get why we needed two words for fewer/less, other than the idea that we just say "more" a lot more frequently than either of the other 2 words... so it sacrifices linguistic clarity for communicative convenience.
"What you can’t do is measure time itself, like counting the number of times that have passed since a certain thing happened."
Oh yeah?
Then why does my mom always ask: "Daniel! How many times have I told you to stop leaving Substack comments that intentionally misinterpret the original intent of a point someone makes?!"?
I like the way your mom thinks.
What about 'Ain't nobody got time for that!' 6 words!!!!
Interesting!
I cannot think of any reason for this disparity other than that we wanted to be more precise and clear when using fewer or less, but not on the other side.
A fun fact. When I moved to the US and got my first few haircuts, I said, please do not make my hair short (which generally meant about 3-4” of hair left in my country of birth). I quickly realized that I have to be precise, like saying cut 1”; otherwise, the outcome would be very different as the word short is relative. For some, it could be a 1” cut. For others, it was a 2-3” cut before they considered it as not short—one of the several things I had to change or learn to be more effective or get what I wanted.
That's a neat example with the haircut. I still don't quite get why we needed two words for fewer/less, other than the idea that we just say "more" a lot more frequently than either of the other 2 words... so it sacrifices linguistic clarity for communicative convenience.