The Merriam-Webster dictionary of English usage
The Merriam-Webster dictionary of English usage
by Unknown author · first published 1993
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…I'll quote the salent bits: "A further complexity: in addition to the N times more/larger than usage, there is also a N times less/lower than [to mean] '1/Nth as much as' usage" "[About this usage, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage reports that] times has now been used in such constructions for about 300 years, and there is no evidence to suggest that it has ever been misunderstood."
on “Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files” ↗…to spot language change. > And nowadays a lot of people seem to be inappropriately overusing "which" You're doing a remarkably terrible job; this change took place seven hundred years ago. Here's The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage: > According to McKnight 1928 that was prevalent in early Middle English, which began to be used as a relative pronoun in the 14th century, and who and whom in the 15th. > [...] By the early 17th century,…
on “Feed readers which don't take "no" for an answer” ↗…speakers who can’t be bothered to learn the rules of the grammar? Unsurprisingly, no. As it turns out, this whole notion that fewer is countable and less is uncountable has been traced back to 1770 by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. And it wasn’t a rule back then, but rather a preference of a single author, Robert Baker. (That’s not to say that no one agreed with him, only that no one else seems to have put it in print back then.)…
on “Dropbox disables ASLR on Windows” ↗