Less fighting, fewer arguments…

This weekend I had a MASSIVE fight with the Boy du Jour.

Let me set the scene.

I’m lying in bed, drifting off to sleep, when he bounces in and starts talking to me about something. In my fuzzy state all I’m picking up is a few key points – just enough to keep my end of the conversation up. That is, until a stray comment drifts across my consciousness: "So then there were less than there had been to start with!"

"Fewer," I mumble. "Fewer than there were to start with."

His brow creases. "What?"

"Less is a volume. Fewer’s a number. S’nothin. Sorry. What happened next?"

"But most people use less to mean numbers."

I’m starting to wake up a bit at this point. Those who know me will be aware that I have a love of the Red Pen and the big less vs fewer debate is a particular bugbear of mine, no less because I came to it shamefully late in life. "Well, then, most people are stupid."

"Why?"

"Because of the grammatical imperative-"

"Surely language is meant to evolve to reflect its usage?"

"Not if its usage is wrong!"

With hindsight, this is where it all started to go a bit tits up. Surely, the Boy said, the OED accepts new words every year based on their usage by we-the-people. So why doesn’t grammar work the same way?

Because we’d rapidly cease to understand each other, I explained crossly, and we’d end up with a nation of imbeciles who communicated only in grunts.

That’s a very narrow world view, he said. I think you’re wrong. We can’t be bound by the rules of a grammar system that makes no sense to anyone anymore. If no one uses it, we’re not wrong - the language is. And it needs to change.

Everything gets a bit hazy here; all I recall is thunder rolling and the red mist descending. And why? Because I couldn’t answer him. I knew with every fibre of my being that what he said was wrong and that I should smother him with the pillow before letting such poison spread into the world – but for the life of me I couldn’t articulate why. (So what exactly did I spend those three years at Oxford doing? Not learning to communicate, that’s for sure.)

So what do you think? Am I too constrained by my preconceived grammatical notions? Do we need to throw the rules of grammar out of the window to reflect the way the nation uses it today (no matter how stupid that may be)? Or – and I really do hope this is the case – does good grammar still have a case for me to argue?