Dodgy English

If I seem to quote dodgy English mostly from the works of Agatha Christie and the Radio Times, it is because I read and re-read Christie's novels (I think I now have them all in paperback), and take Radio Times weekly.

Sometimes it is possible to excuse AC on the grounds that her solecisms are put into the mouths of her characters, so that they are to blame, not the author. But on page 153 of my copy of They Came to Baghdad (a cheap hardback, as it happens), the author herself tells us that "Victoria was just congratulating herself that she had made less mistakes than usual". Not so the writer: the proper term to use is 'fewer', not 'less'.

If some independent authority is required to back up this statement of mine, visit the first edition of H W Fowler's Modern English Usage, a copy of which is on my desk before me. Under the entry 'less' he writes approvingly "The modern tendency is so to restrict less that it means not smaller, but a smaller amount of, is the comparative rather of a little than of little, and is consequently applied only to things that are measured by amount and not by size or quality or number. . . . ."

Now Victoria's mistakes are clearly to be reckoned by number, so the proper way to express the object of her self-congratulation is that she has made fewer mistakes than usual, not less.

But here is a caution: Fowler himself hints that the distinction between fewer and less was a 'modern tendency' when he wrote in 1926. So-called 'correctness' in the use of language is never more than a current 'convention' mutually (but usually unconsciously) agreed by a community to enable all its members to understand one another's speech. But the more precise the conventions, the more precise is the potential understanding; so to ignore the conventions, while not in itself morally wrong, is to put clear understanding at risk.

Dodgy English