Should one say "too many refried beans", or "too much refried beans"?
Should one say "too many refried beans", or "too much refried beans"?
"Too many" kinda sounds right to my ear because beans is plural, but the second logically seems right because its served by volume and is not 'countable' as ordinary (non-destroyed) beans might be.
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Whichever sounds more natural to you, because the whole countable/non-countable less/fewer is crap made up by Edwardian snobs and then repeated by school teacher gammarians too into being "proper". To quote wiki
The comparative less is used with both countable and uncountable nouns in some informal discourse environments and in most dialects of English.[citation needed] In other informal discourse however, the use of fewer could be considered natural. Many supermarket checkout line signs, for instance, will read "10 items or less"; others, however, will use fewer in an attempt to conform to prescriptive grammar. Descriptive grammarians consider this to be a case of hypercorrection as explained in Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage.[7][8] A British supermarket chain replaced its "10 items or less" notices at checkouts with "up to 10 items" to avoid the issue.[9][10] It has also been noted that it is less common to favour "At fewest ten items" over "At least ten items" – a potential inconsistency in the "rule",[11] and a study of online usage seems to suggest that the distinction may, in fact, be semantic rather than grammatical.[8] Likewise, it would be very unusual to hear the unidiomatic "I have seen that film at fewest ten times."[12][failed verification]
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage notes that the "pressure to substitute fewer for less seems to have developed out of all proportion to the ambiguity it may provide in noun phrases like less promising results". It describes conformance with this pressure as a shibboleth and the choice "between the more formal fewer and the more spontaneous less" as a stylistic choice.[13]
Too much Womble.
Well no one way is correct and one way is not, regardless of what this particularly shitty Wikipedia article says.
The comparative less is used with both countable and uncountable nouns in some informal discourse environments and in most dialects of English.[citation needed] In other informal discourse however, the use of fewer could be considered natural.
"in some informal discourse environments?" Does that mean environments in which writing goes unedited and mistakes don't matter?
Just because some people somewhere do a thing doesn't mean it's right. To people with formal writing experience, or people that are just well read, the agreement errors are obvious and revealing.
This is a question of diction not style. Check the dictionary. Less and fewer have different meanings. One of them affirmatively describes something uncountable.
The thing is that language constantly changes and it often does so towards whatever the habitual usage of it is, "rules" be damned. We're not bothering with a thou/you distinction in English any more, for example. If people abandon the countable/uncountable distinction then it's no longer incorrect, for whatever version of "incorrect" is being applied here.
Yeah no doubt, I will wait till they update the definition of the words in the dictionary though. Until then, less and fewer are not interchangeable as they mean different things.
When they update the dictionary, they don't look to how English is spoken by momos on the internet. They look to distinguished authors and writers.
This distinction was first tentatively suggested by the grammarian Robert Baker in 1770,[3][1] and it was eventually presented as a rule by many grammarians since then.[a] However, modern linguistics has shown that idiomatic past and current usage consists of the word less with both countable nouns and uncountable nouns so that the traditional rule for the use of the word fewer stands, but not the traditional rule for the use of the word less.[3] As Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage explains, "Less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted.”
"Correct" was a suggestion by someone which got over zealously picked up by grammarians despite in flying in the face of common usage. There is no acedemy of English to dictate that this rule change is the one true way of speaking and even if there was it would have about as much effect as the French one trying to suppress "le weekend".
Like I'm a little confused. The correctness of it is dictated by the definition.
No, correctness is defined by usage. There is no high authority that lays down rules and you are wrong if you break them. 100 years ago you would have been considered incorrect if you asked "who am I speaking to?" rather than "To whom am I speaking?". There wasnt a committee meeting some time in the 50s where it was decided to change the rules and depreciate cases in who/whom it just happened naturally and what is "correct" evolved.
Dictionaries themselves say that that they document how language is used rather than setting rules to follow, hence they now inculde a definition of literally as "not actually true but for emphasis".
I am the higher authority.
This is a question of noun phrase agreement and diction. If you use the wrong word you create a disagreement error. Period. Maybe whatever poser dictionary you use has a new form of less or fewer but mine doesn't.
No sweety, you are not...