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TGM comments on What Is Signaling, Really? - LessWrong
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Certainly in the circles I'm from in the UK, less/fewer is very much used as a signal. I don't think I could use the 'wrong' one without getting corrected if the audience is sufficiently large.
Question: In casual conversation, does the proportion of the time I am corrected increase with the number of people as if they each corrected as iid Bernoulli random variables? (i.e. if I get corrected 1/2 of the time with one other person, then it's 3/4 of the time with 2, 7/8ths of the time with 3 etc.)
I suspect that I would be corrected more often than that model predicts in larger groups, because there are more people to signal status to.
This is precisely why I don't correct people's grammar in public settings even when I might in a one-on-one conversation - I don't want to signal being pedantic.
That's another thing. Precise grammar used to indicate education, but now it mostly signals pedantism.
I've noticed that different groups correct grammar to different degrees. Many people (e.g. almost everyone on reddit) will correct you if you mix up they're/there/their or use an apostrophe incorrectly, but not very many people will say anything if you dangle a modifier or split an infinitive. And the same people who readily correct well-known errors (they're/there/their) don't like it if you correct a more obscure error.
There´s a difference there though. Less & fewer mean same thing, so writer using those abnormally isn´t really an error, it´s just something people don´t usually do. They´re , there, their mean different things so correcting those really makes the world better.
The rule as usually understood is that fewer relates to discrete quantities, fewer apples, and less to continuous quantities, less milk. It's possibly rather artificial, and noticeably lacking a counterpart in "more".
Or inversely, they could be less likely to correct you in a larger group because they assume someone else will do it.