BerryPick6 comments on By Which It May Be Judged - LessWrong

35 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 04:26AM

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Comment author: BerryPick6 22 December 2012 03:22:36PM -1 points [-]

too much upvotes, and too little downvotes

Isn't it 'too many upvotes' and 'too few downvotes'?

Comment author: [deleted] 22 December 2012 05:01:09PM *  2 points [-]

Yep. On the British National Corpus there are:

  • 6 instances of too much [*nn2*] (where [*nn2*] is any plural noun);
  • 576 instances of too many [*nn2*];
  • 0 instances of too little [*nn2*]; and
  • 123 instances of too few [*nn2*] (and 83 of not enough [*nn2*], for that matter);

on the Corpus of Contemporary American English the figures are 75, 3217, 11, 323 and 364 respectively. (And many of the minoritarian uses are for things that you'd measure by some means other than counting them, e.g. “too much drugs”.) So apparently the common use of “less” as an informal equivalent of “fewer” only applies to the comparatives. (Edited to remove the “now-” before “common” -- in the Corpus of Historical American English less [*nn2*] appears to be actually slightly less common today than it was in the late 19th century.)