Motivated Grammar

This "rule" is really just bull, in my opinion.

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/10-items-or-less-is-just-fine/

So is this a sign of that horror of horrors, the destruction of the English language by modern speakers who can’t be bothered to learn the rules of the grammar?

Unsurprisingly, no. As it turns out, this whole notion that fewer is countable and less is uncountable has been traced back to 1770 by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. And it wasn’t a rule back then, but rather a preference of a single author, Robert Baker. (That’s not to say that no one agreed with him, only that no one else seems to have put it in print back then.) So it’s not that modern ne’er-do-wells are ruining the language; at worst, they’re returning it to an earlier state. The OED attests countable less in 1481, derived from an Old English usage attested by no less a personage than King Alfred.

All right. So less used to be fine with countables. Then a dude came along and said he wasn’t fond of that, and his opinion eventually got codified into a rule. But, as MWDEU and the Google results point out, countable less remains common, despite the widespread acceptance of this rule outlawing it. Now, to me, that suggests that the rule that less can’t be used with count nouns is spurious.

Summary: The idea that less can’t be used with count nouns isn’t well supported; it’s a rule that hasn’t ever been strictly followed, especially for count nouns that can be…

Speaking of pretentious-douchebag-grammar-nerds, allow me to explain the evolution of the “I’m going to refer to a singular noun with a plural pronoun” linguistic phenomenon. It’s a product of increased gender equality. People used to generically refer to everyone as males

That's entirely and entirely typically wrong. Singular "they" has been well-established in English for centuries. The great writers have always used it freely—that includes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and seemingly everybody else. "A person can't help their birth," says Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. (Edit: it's fun to dig up these classical examples, because they sound so modern and fresh. "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes"—Wilde. "It's enough to drive anyone out of their senses"—Shaw. "Everybody does and says what they please"—Byron.)

The ironic thing is that the "rule" about generic "he" (and later, "he or she" and all the other stilted variants) was fabricated by grammarians who looked at how English actually worked, said "Goodness no that can't be right because Latin doesn't do that", and started telling everybody their grammar was wrong.

(Notice how I just used singular "they". Should I have said, "telling everybody his grammar was wrong"? Or "his or her", or "his/er", or just "her", if you're one of those? Or, to adapt the OP's suggestion, "telling everybody everybody's grammar was wrong"?)

People never stopped using it, though, and by 1850 the…

I admit that the crack about mediocre writing was unhelpful. Also, my whole post was too long. This topic gets under my skin.

Beyond that, I would say that many of the things prescriptivists discuss are not grammatical mistakes. They are often disagreements about usage where reasonable people can disagree, but more importantly many of them are literally myths. That is, many of these so-called rules have never had good support in English usage or etymology or linguistics. In many cases, they are just usages that bothered someone in the 19th or 20th century who made a lot of noise. (For some discussion, browse through the hits to this search: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5 or here: http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/national-grammar-day-2009-ten-common-grammar-myths-debunked/ )

For what it's worth, I find poor usage and poor grammar very grating as well. My point wasn't that we should celebrate it, but that cranky rants aren't good ways to deal with bad writing or speech. It helps to write well. It helps to recommend good writing. It helps to point out to people why one way of putting something might be more effective than another. But the Andy Rooney style of complaining (which, I'm sorry, I thought the article belonged to) isn't helpful.

Awesome result. I think it's vitally important to acknowledge achievements that happen in parallel with research at the LHC because otherwise we're going to miss a lot of very neat results. I don't know enough about particle physics to be able to comment on the techniques involved unfortunately, but I love reading about the progress that's being made.

For someone that Wikipedia's a lot of this stuff, does someone know if this type of spin asymmetry is in any sense related to CP violation? [1] As soon as I read the article I thought of CP violation and I'm assuming this is basically the "P" violation.

Finally, reading this article actually triggered a totally different question:

"Using the electron accelerator at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, the researchers shined 170 billion electrons on a target of liquid deuterium over 2 months in 2009."

Shined or shone? Turns out to be quite the discussion topic (e.g., [2][3][4])!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation

[2] http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/shined.html

[3] http://grammarist.com/usage/shined-shone/

[4] http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/has-the-sun-shined-or-shone/

This turns out to be a little harder to dig up from HN Search than I thought, so I've made a list of some of my favorite links on the topic. If you find any other high-quality ones, please let me know—there are several I couldn't easily find again in five minutes. I know Language Log has had many good posts about it.

There are many memorable details in this history, such as that the first English grammarian to prescribe generic 'he' was a successful female entrepreneur (who ironically was mostly an anti-prescriptivist), and that the name of another was the delightfully apropos Sir Charles Coote.

http://www.siu-voss.net/Androcentrism_in_prescriptive_grammar.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-onlanguage-t.html

http://www.damninteresting.com/when-they-became-him/

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html

http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html

http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austhlis.html

Descriptive linguistics doesn't mean "whatever anyone says is correct and it should go." This ain't 'nam, there are rules, and you can still run afoul of them. The basic tenet of descriptivism is that, as people who study linguistic patterns as a science, we can't make a value judgment about a certain set of rules or what a person "should use". However, I think it's generally accepted that we try to strive for some common set of agreed upon linguistic rules when trying to formally communicate on the Internet, and many would claim that the subjunctive mood would fall into that.

I saw a really good write-up about this before and wish I could find it :(

EDIT: This one's not it, but it's very similar: http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/descriptivism-isnt-anything-goes/