When I first learned the difference, I recall thinking there was an obvious mnemonic that would distinguish between the male spelling and the female spelling of the names "Francis" and "Frances".

Unfortunately, it doesn't work for "Jessie" and "Jesse" ...

Similarly I find it useful to recall that in spelling "discrete" (as distinct from "discreet"), the E's are kept at a discrete distance.

While for distinguishing "compliment" from "complement," I think of the latter as a version of "complete-ment."

Brilliant. I hope you were able to show your student how to eliminate all those periods.

I have never misspelled "separate" since elementary school because I've always remembered that the word has a rat in it.

I always remember that when you separate things, you keep them apart.

You may have misunderstood that "You connect, I cut" is a mnemonic for spelling Connecticut, a US state...

I don't think there is really a rule for Jess(*) for girls.

The best I can come up for men is that Jessie is often short for Jessiah, which is definitely a guy's name, and Jesse is another biblical name.

Girls can get cute with the name Jessica, so you get Jesse, Jessa, Jessi, Jessie, Jessy, Jessey, Jess, and so on, which can also just be the name on her birth certificate.

I think that name sort of went into a random place that is currently without rules, but I really don't know much about this stuff.

Now I am thinking of the only pop song that contains the word "moot".

when I'm typing fast and have to spell banana I sometimes don't know when to stop and get banananana...

Nice.

I have a few standard typing mistakes, but the most frequent is "studnet" for "student."

I am really grateful for spell checkers because I'm a terrible speller.

Think of the Gwen Stephani song.

What do you guys think of saying something like "This product is available for fifteen dollars or less?"

Should we be required to use "fewer" since dollars is countable, or in this instance can we justify "less" on the grounds that what we're actually discussing is price, which as a concept is uncountable and which is frequently given in a mixture of both dollars and cents?

Less is fine here. In fact, I think it’s preferred unless the buyer is required to pay using only $1 bills.

Would you say "15 ounces of gold or fewer"?

I'd say "or less." You would never tell someone that you're "fewer" than an hour away or even "fewer" than ten minutes away. Same goes for money. I have "less" than a thousand dollars in my pocket is okay.

We've probably had the argument before but less v fewer is for me the most grating example of prescriptivist overreach. "Less" has a long history of use for countable items and the antonym, "more", is still used for countable items, but because some guy in 1770 decided he personally preferred "fewer", now we're supposed to follow this rule. (More information on the wiki page).

However, even if you're a fewer devotee, there's usually an exception carved out for time, money, distance and weight, which as far as I'm concerned isn't an exception but rather a demonstration that the rule is wrong.

Also, which do you guys think is more natural?

"There were at least 50 people at the party last night"
"There were at fewest 50 people at the party last night"

If you prefer the first, why? Aren't you breaking the rules?

I agree that "fifteen dollars" is a single price and anyone who uses "fewer" here doesn't speak English as their first language, or is an annoying pedant with no friends. Natural speakers will make the right choice naturally whether they know the rule or not.

I would use less and treat the phrase as a mass quantity, not as a count. But you could say "15 or fewer ounces of gold" if that is your intended meaning. It isn't the same.


I'm not sure the second is even grammatically correct. These are adverb phrases with "least" and "fewest" functioning as nouns. This isn't like the original question.

If you want to user fewer, the correct sentence is, "There were no fewer than 50 people at the party."

The first. No one would say the second.

I don't think it is so much an exception but that while these types of things can be countable, in most uses they are more of a continuum.

I agree that "fifteen dollars" is a single price and anyone who uses "fewer" here doesn't speak English as their first language, or is an annoying pedant with no friends. Native speakers will make the right choice intuitively whether they know the rule or not.

I would use less and treat the phrase as a mass quantity, not as a count. But you could say "15 or fewer ounces of gold" if that is your intended meaning. It isn't the same.


I don't think the second is even grammatically correct. These are adverb phrases with "least" and "fewest" functioning as nouns, and they are not qualifying "people" like the adjectives less and fewer would.

not on your life

You just want to the type out the banana song, don't you?

I'm on board with this thinking. If no one is going to die over a mix-up of meaning, it's probably not that important.

For example, if a doctor told a nurse to give a patient a dose of 3 pills or less, the nurse isn't going to accidentally screw up and give a dose of 7 pills because he didn't say 3 pills or fewer.