If you listen, you'll hear people talk about the methodology they use to perform some action or task; methodology, however, is the study of methods, not the methods themselves. Almost nobody really has anything to do with methodology, or understands much about it. Grump.
You also hear people talk a lot about "dampening" some trend. To dampen something, thank you, means to wet it down, usually by pouring water over it. You can, in fact, dampen someone's ardor (which you accomplish by raining on their parade), but in general you DAMP trends, oscillations, and the like. ("Wet down that trend for me, will you?")
I think the incorrect version this one is falling out of use, very fortunately. It really means the one before the last one. That is, when I ride the bus home, I can get off at the penultimate stop if I don't want to go all the way to the end of the line.
I recently heard one of the hosts on National Public Radio say this, when he meant "uninterested". Shame. Disinterested means "having no vested interest" -- you can be extremely interested in some transaction, and nonetheless function quite legally as a disinterested third party... provided you don't own any stock in either of the two parties involved. (That's imprecise, but I hope it gets the general idea across.)
For some reason, lots of people don't seem to get it that you can have precisely 3 apples, but there isn't any such thing as precisely 3 gallons of gasoline.
When we are obliged to measure a substance by any means other than counting it, the measurement is necessarily imprecise. Liquids, for example, not only change their volume when the temperature changes, but also evaporate, so that their volume would constantly be changing in any case, even if the temperature could be held exactly constant, which it can't. (Temperature is another imprecise quantity.)
Scales, which measure weight, are also imprecise. (Besides, that piece of iron weighs considerably less at the top of Pike's Peak than it does on the beach at Malibu. This is to say nothing of the fact that it weighs a whole lot less on the surface of the Moon than it does anywhere around here, though its mass is essentially unchanged. Of course, we can't measure mass with absolute precision either. In fact, we can't measure ANYTHING with absolute precision... there's no such thing as absolute precision.)
On the other hand, it's quite easy to determine exactly how many jelly beans there are in that 55-gallon drum (provided none of them has gotten squished or broken), which is good because it means you can really tell who won the prize by making the closest guess. (...Though you probably want to have a machine do the counting!)
"Number" just isn't the same as "amount".
Because of that, if you have fewer jelly beans, you say "fewer" instead of "less". You can't have "fewer" gasoline in your tank (though one pump can dispense fewer gasolines than another -- that's back to counting -- and you can, if you are in ordinary conversation, certainly have fewer gallons of gasoline), and you can't really have "less" jellybeans, because even if you took them by filling a quart jar, you could still count them if you chose to. On the other hand, as Corey M Gerritsen of MIT points out, at least for everyday real-world purposes you should be able to say "less" about anything you buy by quantity, including jellybeans. I am not entirely at ease with that (I find it difficult even to type the words "I have less jellybeans than you do", much less "I have less jellybean", which is Corey's version), but Corey does definitely have a point: there is a broad borderline here, and room for a certain amount of looseness.
My problem, I guess, is not so much with the specifics as it is with the fact that lots of people not only get it egregiously wrong, but clearly don't care to understand the underlying issues.
Another thing that came up during my exchange with Corey Gerritsen is the fact that "more" and "less" can have other meanings as well, meanings that have more to do with magnitude of a different sort than with either number or quantity. For example, I have a Dare "Jelly Gem" (I presume that's trademarked) here, and I believe I can reasonably assure you that your jellybean is a lot less jellybean than my Jelly Gem, even though my Jelly Gem is not a jellybean at all because of the vagaries of the trademark system. (I am not sure who has the name "jellybean" trademarked, though I have my suspicions.)
...But that's really a different subject, and I think I'll leave it for a different page.
As I think of them, or as people suggest them to me, I'll be adding more of these. I'm pretty sure I've got at least a dozen in my head already, but tonight only a few have bubbled to the surface.
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