The Merriam-Webster dictionary of English usage

What Hacker News says

1. tmoertelDec 2025
   No, it does not conform. As I wrote earlier, I have not seen that usage for less than 100%. So 600% conforms; 50% does not.

   That is, expressions like "twice as slow/thin/short/..." or "2x as slow/thin/short/..." or "200% as slow/thin/short/..." have a well-established usage that is understood to mean "half as fast/thick/tall/..."

   But "50% as slow/thin/short/..." or "half as slow/thin/short/..." have no such established usage.

   For some evidence to support my claim, please see this 2008 discussion on Language Log:

   https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=463#:~:text=A%20fur...

   Since HN has a tendency to trim URLs and might prevent this link from taking you to the relevant portion of a rather lengthy article, I'll quote the salent bits:

   "A further complexity: in addition to the N times more/larger than usage, there is also a N times less/lower than [to mean] '1/Nth as much as' usage"

   "[About this usage, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage reports that] times has now been used in such constructions for about 300 years, and there is no evidence to suggest that it has ever been misunderstood."

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2. thaumasiotesDec 2024
   > Here's a sample explanation: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/grammar/which-vs-that

   That might be a sample of what you're thinking, but it isn't a correct explanation of anything. It's just some random mythmaking, which is par for the course from "grammar advice" websites.

   Which and that are not distinguished in the manner that page wishes they were. That cannot be used (in the modern language) to introduce a nonrestrictive relative clause. Which can be used to introduce a restrictive or nonrestrictive relative clause.

   > There is a real difference between "which" and "that", whether Joe Sixpack gives a damn or not.

   There are real differences, but there are no differences as to the usage you flagged. The bigger difference is that which, being a pronoun, is part of a gender distinction (with who) between persons and nonpersons, whereas that, not being a pronoun, has no such distinction.

   You might note, hopefully, that if feed readers were people, "feed readers who don't take 'no' for an answer" would be completely standard grammar. The same is also obviously true of "feed readers which don't take 'no' for an answer" when the feed readers aren't people.

   CGEL [Cambridge Grammar of the English Language; both authors are from the UK] doesn't even bother to mention this myth, but the first example of a relative clause that it does give is He'll be glad to take the toys which you don't want. (Chapter 12 §2.1, example 1.i; page 1034)

   If you want to play a grammarian on the internet, wouldn't it be better to know some grammar first?

   > I try to spot language change.

   > And nowadays a lot of people seem to be inappropriately overusing "which"

   You're doing a remarkably terrible job; this change took place seven hundred years ago. Here's The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage:

   > According to McKnight 1928 that was prevalent in early Middle English, which began to be used as a relative pronoun in the 14th century, and who and whom in the 15th.

   > [...] By the early 17th century, which and that were being used pretty much interchangeably. Evans 1957 quotes this passage from the Authorized (King James) Version (1611) of the Bible:

   >> Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.

   > During the later 17th century, Evans tells us, that fell into disuse, at least in literary English. It went into such an eclipse that its reappearance in the early 18th century was noticed and satirized by Joseph Addison in The Spectator (30 May 1711) in a piece entitled "Humble Petition of Who and Which against the upstart Jack Sprat That."

   (entry for that [1]; page 894 of the 1993 printing.)

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3. aestraSep 2013
   This "rule" is really just bull, in my opinion.

   http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/10-items-or...

   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 perceived as masses. Groceries lend themselves to perception as a mass, so it’s no surprise that “10 items or less” is favored now, just as it has been historically. Please stop complaining about this.

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