Less vs. fewer

"I want you to develop and train a group of players, not less than eight, and no more than fifteen...." -- The Soprano Sorceress by L. E. Modesitt, Jr., pg. 554.

Still, there were less than forty in each salvo. -- The Shadow of Saganami by David Weber, pg. 726

As noted by the Grammar Girl, though "less" and "fewer" are used to mean the same thing, the two words are used in differing situations. "Less" is used for indicating a smaller amount of something that is uncountable, figuratively or literally, and "fewer" for countable items. "Sand" is not considered a countable item, despite the fact that one could, technically, count the number of grains on a beach or some such, but that would take one longer than the time allocated to ones existence. One can count people or bullets, sticky buns and opinions. One cannot count clothing, rough-housing, nor enamored-ness. That is, one might have fewer people, bullets, sticky buns, and/or opinions, but less clothing. One could ask ones children for less rough-housing and for ones daughter to be less enamored of the head of the local motorcycle gang.

That's how I learned things way back when in the black days of schooling in which teachers actually taught the rules of the grammar road, one learned how to diagram sentences, and one learned to place adverbs next to the word or phrase that the adverb modifies. Nowadays, though, we seem to want to merge meanings and uses of varying words such that they become interchangeable. A fair few of the posts on this blog will probably deal with aspects of this movement (e.g., elevation vs. altitude, farther vs. further).

[Mr. Modesitt, my favorite author, is some 16 years older than am I, so I know that he also learned English grammar in those same old times. So did Mr. Weber, who is only some nine years younger than Mr. Modesitt. (These two authors are sole authors or co-authors of a significant chunk of my personal library; they are both prolific and are incredibly good world builders -- unlike J. K. Rowling, who seems not to have cared about the Harry Potter backstory, though she did spin a great yarn.)]

I object to this lessening of the number of distinct words that we use. English may be the premiere language of the world in the great abundance of ways to say similar, but not quite the same, things. I feel that this reduction in variety is driven by those too lazy or ignorant to know the difference in the usage of word dichotomies such as this one. Additionally, I note that these conflations of two words seem to move only one word's usage, not both. So, while many consider as acceptable the use of "less" in the above quotes, those same folks would consider the phrase "fewer clothing" to be flat-out incorrect.

Viva variety!