> "Dissociation from Birth" section sounds interesting until you learn that all alphabetic systems arose from a similar process, e.g. aleph was a drawing of an ox's head, etc.
My understanding of Korean (Hangul) is that the alphabet design is based on the shape of mouth in articulation, sonics, category, etc. of the letters themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design
Hangul is an exception to many similar "historically true" patterns mostly because it was created so late. Hangul is more a single person's well-educated effort, not something that emerged over time from various local customs. The castle I grew up near is easily 150+ years older than Hangul.
People often complain about designers making changes to websites/software that simplify the ui and display less information for the sake of improving clarity, but I do think that it might be the right answer here.
Do people really want a clock on every kitchen appliance in 2024? I usually will just turn off the clock where possible now and just use my phone for time. Having no clock isn't a problem but having a clock showing the wrong time is a problem.
> Do people really want a clock on every kitchen appliance in 2024?
As someone who doesn't wear a watch and doesn't use my phone while cooking, I find the clocks invaluable. The oven clock usefully shows the time when the microwave clock is counting down.
You can also just get a dedicated clock, and then it will always show the time no matter what your appliances are doing, and you only ever have to do upkeep on the time and maybe-battery of the one time piece.
I do in fact have a dedicated clock in the kitchen. It sings African bird calls on the hour. But it is less visible from the cooking area, hence my reliance on the appliance clocks.
Its fairly common for the microwave clock to be the main clock for kitchen. Especially since the one on the stove tends to _also_ be super complicated to set correctly (ours was in french for 2 months because we clicked the wrong thing), so when the power goes out it just stays wrong thereafter.
Given everyone has a phone in the pocket and a huge chunk more have a watch on their wrist, what need is there for a "main clock" for the kitchen to be something so awful?
TIL. I thought this would be related to King Biscuit Time, "the longest-running daily American radio broadcast in history", but apparently it's just a coincidence:
> Now we just need an agency to safeguard us against misusing "less" when "fewer" would be correct
Genuinely curious, is this for pedantry, or does the word choice matter? Since the opposite of both is "more", why is there a need for a distinction in one direction and not the other?
The underlying distinction is about mass versus countable nouns.
You can't refer to a sheet of paper as "a paper" (that refers to something else - a completed document). And you can't call a piece of furniture "a furniture", nor can you ask for "a scissors". They are mass nouns, inherently plural, referring to an abstract, indefinite amount of something. (Or in English, something coming in pairs, like scissors.) To refer to a specific instance, you need to use a determiner like "a piece of paper".
Or a head of cattle. You can't have two cattles. You have two head of cattle. Cattle come in a herd with an ambiguous number of them Other nouns are count nouns, and can be directly counted; they're definitive. A cat, two cats, four cats. Count nouns go with "fewer". Mass nouns go with "less". Over-educated writers might make a distinction here where "fewer cattle" is visualizing a few individuals, while "less cattle" is visualizing a smaller herd. I do think that's overly pedantic. Very few people make that distinction cleanly.
Some languages have no concept of count nouns at all, all nouns are mass nouns. Some languages have no concept of mass nouns, and all nouns are count nouns. Or nearly so. English has and uses both. Some cases are sort of blurry or unclear. "Six rains" = it has rained six times. That's maybe grammatical, but it's very unnatural in English. We do not feel we can count the times it rains, that way. It has to qualify a word that can be counted, like "times" - a pattern so common we get abbreviated counter words like "once" and "twice". Most languages have a touch of both patterns. Even in Chinese, which supposedly has no count nouns, there a few places when you do just count things directly.
So, no, it's not necessary. But if your language does make the distinction, it's very common for agreement patterns to show up based around that distinction. Akin to how French adjectives agree with their noun in number and gender.
> Even in Chinese, which supposedly has no count nouns, there a few places when you do just count things directly.
Are those things nouns? Days, for example, must be counted directly, except that the grammar is very clear that 天 is not a noun at all.
月 can be used with or without a measure word, but the obvious analysis would be that it is a noun if used with a measure word and not if counted directly, much like 人.
(Preemptive counterargument: is "right" a noun or an adjective?)
One nitpick: Grammatically, mass nouns are not (necessarily) plural. You’d say “Paper is made from wood.”, not “Paper are made from wood.” (Of course, the pair words like scissors are different, i.e. “My scissors are in my backpack.” (I also seem to recall that there are non-pair mass nouns that only exist in plural form, but I cannot think of any examples.)
You said in your post that mass nouns are “inherently plural”, which grammatically they are not. I suppose you were referring to the meanings of those words, though.
Because scissors is plural, which does not have an indefinite article. You can ask for scissors, like you can ask for documents. (And you cannot ask for a documents, only for a document.)
In my head the opposite of fewer (“more”) and the opposite of less (“more”) feel like different words that happen to be homonyms.
I haven’t looked it up but this is unlikely to have been the etymological history — if there ever even were two different words at all, one likely crowded the other out. But anyway, that’s how my brain works.
Less instead of fewer sort of bugs me. But I've even seen less used in The Economist when I would have thought fewer was more correct so I think the answer is it's pedantry at this point. (To be clear, pedantry in the sense that less can be (usually?) substituted for fewer but not the other way around.)
The Great Leap Forward Poured Down Upon Us One Day Like A Mighty Storm, Suddenly And Furiously Blinding Our Senses.
We Stood Transfixed In Blank Devotion As Our Leader Spoke To Us, Looking Down On Our Mute Faces With A Great, Raging, And Unseeing Eye.
Like The Howling Glory Of The Darkest Winds, This Voice Was Thunderous And The Words Holy, Tangling Their Way Around Our Hearts And Clutching Our Innocent Awe.
A Message Of Avarice Rained Down And Carried Us Away Into False Dreams Of Endless Riches.
"Annihilate The Sparrow, That Stealer Of Seed, And Our Harvests Will Abound; We Will Watch Our Wealth Flood In."
And By Our Own Hand Did Every Last Bird Lie Silent In Their Puddles, The Air Barren Of Song As The Clouds Drifted Away. For Killing Their Greatest Enemy, The Locusts Noisily Thanked Us And Turned Their Jaws Toward Our Crops, Swallowing Our Greed Whole.
Millions Starved And We Became Skinnier And Skinnier, While Our Leaders Became Fatter And Fatter.
Finally, As That Blazing Sun Shone Down Upon Us, Did We Know That True Enemy Was The Voice Of Blind Idolatry; And Only Then Did We Begin To Think For Ourselves.
- Red Sparowes, "Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Red Sun"
For anyone else wondering why each word in this is capitalised:
“Despite having no lyrics, the album (by way of its song titles) follows the story of the Great Leap Forward in Mao Zedong-era China, more specifically recounting the Great Sparrow Campaign, a mass killing of sparrows (along with rats, flies and mosquitoes) that fed on a portion of the harvest and were seen as pests.” [0]
