this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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On accident

I kind of can't take people seriously when they say On accident, I don't know or care if its more or less grammatical, it sounds like a child sputtering in my mind. It should be By accident or accidentally

Tummy

Any adult has zero business saying this lol

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[–] sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

They're not interchangeable. 'Fewer' is for countable nouns and 'less' is for aggregate nouns, just like 'how many' and 'how much'.

E.g:

Aggregate:

"How much sand? Less sand."

Countable:

"How many grains of sand? Fewer grains of sand."

[–] boatswain@infosec.pub 7 points 4 months ago

Along with that, I'll add in "number" vs "amount":

  • A shocking number of people get this wrong (countable)
  • The amount of confusion about it is distressing (aggregate)
[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Oh believe me, I know. I agree.

but the argument nowadays is that common usage dictates that both are now "acceptable", similar to how apparently "literally" now effectively means "figuratively" because everyone uses it.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

We don’t have to accept it.