google ngrams

Less or fewer

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Earlier this week a Facebook friend alerted me to National Grammar Day (4 March or March fo(u)rth, geddit?) with a cartoon in which a woman says ‘Be super annoying in a convo in 4 words or less …’ and a man replies ‘4 words or fewer!’

Grammar isn’t about being annoying. It’s about being interesting, and about usage informing rules and not rules prescribing usage.

Prescriptivists state that less is used with uncountable nouns and fewer with countable nouns. But less with countable nouns is well and truly used. Google Ngrams shows that words or less has always been more common than words or fewer, peaking between 1920 and 1960, for some reasons to do to with international politics. 

The complete list of results for ‘*_NOUN or less, *_NOUN or fewer’ (the top 10 results) shows: year or less, years or less, percent or less, hours or less, months or less, (per) cent or less, days or fewer, pupils or fewer, words or fewer, hours or fewer, persons or fewer, employees or fewer, years or fewer, dozen or fewer, number or fewer, words or less, pounds or less, percent or fewer, feet or less, days or less. Clearly, less and fewer are used pretty much interchangeably in this context, whatever the prescriptivists say. Maybe there is a slight difference: five years or less means any amount of years, months or days (treating time as continuous) while five years or fewer means four, three, two, one or zero years (treating years as discrete).  

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“unbristled excitement”

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The Korea Herald reports that:

In a rare display of unbristled excitement, residents of Pyongyang took to the streets Monday to celebrate North Korea’s Under-17 women’s football team, which claimed the World Cup title by defeating the Netherlands.

(which the state television station didn’t broadcast until two days later). 

Unbristled excitement is quite simply wrong, but I can’t decide whether the reporter chose the wrong word deliberately or accidentally, or it’s an autoreplacement which no-one spotted.

Unbridled is a rare word, and probably only found in contexts of horses or excitement etc. Google Ngrams shows the top 10 results for unbridled *_NOUN (which shows the top 10 results) as passion, lust, power, passions, fury, discretion, license, tongue, licentiousness, licence. So where does unbridled excitement rank? There is something wrong with Ngrams’ programming, because unbridled excitement ranks between license and tongue, so it should appear in the top 10. Incidentally, (the usage of) unbridled passion and unbridled lust have increased greatly over the last 30-40 years. The rest have increased slightly, except for unbridled discretion, which peaked in 1986 and has been decreasing since. 

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LORRAINE QUICHE

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A pie shop sells SPINACH QUICHE and LORRAINE QUICHE. Elsewhere, it is overwhelmingly quiche Lorraine (or lorraine) and I can’t decide why Lorraine (or lorraine) quiche looks and sounds so strange. Partly (or mostly) it’s because no-one writes it anywhere Google can find it. I searched for “Lorraine quiche” and “lorraine quiche” (in quotation marks for an exact match) and got absolutely no results.

In French, adjectives usually, probably always follow nouns, but Lorraine is a noun, and I don’t know how noun modifiers work in French.

Wikipedia lists Quiche au Camembert, Quiche aux champignons, Quiche aux endives, Quiche aux épinards, Quiche au fromage de Gruyère, Quiche aux fromage blanc, Quiche aux fruits de mer, Quiche aux oignons, Quiche aux poireaux, Quiche au Roquefort, Quiche comtoise, Quiche lorraine and  Quiche niçoise, à la tomate, and shows photos of salmon and spinach quiche, leek and mushroom quiche and spinach quiche.

No-one can quite decide whether L/lorraine should have an upper or lower case letter or is a noun or adjective. Wikipedia lists Quiche lorraine, but the linked page uses Lorraine throughout.

Google Ngrams includes spinach quiche and quiche lorraine as both a noun and adjective. Compare quiche niçoise, which is definitely an adjective (Nice quiche, with French pronunciation would sound even stranger, and with English pronunciation would mean something different).

Soon after I drafted this post, I was talking to a woman named Lorraine, and she agreed that Lorraine quiche sounded strange. She said she relates more to the French historical region than the pastry recipe.

A sneaky word

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A few months ago I randomly encountered an online article which used

snook

as the past tense of 

sneak. 

A few weeks ago I randomly encountered the same article again. I didn’t save the article and I can’t find it now. It was about some people who “snook into a stadium” or “into a football match”. I asked my Facebook friends, and those who responded said “mistake”, “… unless the author is using similar linguistic devices throughout” (which I don’t remember was the case) “an Americanism, like snuck” (possibly; there was no particular indication that the writer was American) and “mistake”.

Snuck (use it or not (I don’t), like it or not (I don’t)) is here to stay (and is already used more than sneaked in US English, and almost as much in British English). Snook is either a mistake or a very rare alternative. Searching for snook by itself finds mostly irrelevant results for people with that surname, fish or a town in Texas. But then: 

“No, you got all sneaky and snuck around and snook that vote away from me. And I know this because earlier I sneaked and snooked around and Jammy was supposed to vote for me. The snooker has become the snort.” Leslie Knope to Ron Swanson

I recognise the names as characters from Parks and Recreation (which I have never seen). So writers of tv comedies can use it. (Writers of tv comedies can do a lot of things.) Note snooked. I assume that snooker is pronounced similarly and not like the table-balls-and-cue sport.

Searching for “snook into” found a few uses, for example “someone snook into my [hotel] room” on Tripadviser and “this guy snook into [a sports stadium when it was closed]” on reddit.

Searching for “snook into a stadium” found nothing, but “snook into the stadium” found this tweet:

the streaker at the Granada vs Manchester United game, snook into the stadium at around 7am”, But that is an auto-translation from German: der Flitzer beim Spiel Granada gegen Manchester United gegen 7 Uhr morgens ins Stadion geschlichen ist 

With snuck and sneaked to choose from, I can’t see why any auto-translator would be programmed to use snook. 

But I still need a genuine use of snook. I don’t know how I found it, but luckily I saved the URL. From the BBC, no less: 

Zoe snook into rehearsals to catch up with Patrick and Anya and Fiona and Anton. 

I assume that the BBC has a style guide and that snook isn’t in it. In fact, I assume that snuck isn’t in it, either. I’ll venture that no style guide so much as mentions snook in this sense, whatever it might say about snuck and sneaked. I’ll get proscriptive and say “Don’t use snook. People will question your intelligence and/or ability in English” (unless you are a writer of a tv comedy). In fact, I’ll say “Don’t use snuck“, but most people will ignore me.

The rise of snuck is relatively recent. Most discussions date it to the late 19th century, but Google Ngrams shows its rise from the late 1990s. Sneaked has risen at the same time, in part because people are using it to compare and contrast with snuck. Have we spent more time sneaking in the last 25 years?