Stannis on 'Fewer'

There’s a JPEG out there on the Internet spoofing “Game of Thrones” character Stannis Baratheon as a grammar snob. If you’re very behind in your viewing, here’s your spoiler alert: a spoiler is coming.

Stannis’s young daughter, Shireen, is tied to a post and set on fire. Wailing, the little girl asks, “Why are you sacrificing me after spending less than three weeks stuck here?”

In the next panel, her father, whose affection for proper grammar has been, until this point, eclipsed by love for his little girl, replies: “Fewer.”

I’ll admit I laughed. But in fact, whoever wrote the joke had his facts wrong. Shireen’s grammar was fine – even if you’re taking a very conservative approach to less and fewer.

Why? Because “fewer” modifies countable, plural things – individual units. Fewer items, fewer calories, fewer side effects. But Shireen wasn’t talking about weeks as individual units. She was talking about thing that is singular in concept: a single duration of time. And singulars are modified by “less.”

Fewer than three weeks would mean exactly two weeks or exactly one week or exactly no weeks. It couldn’t mean two weeks and six days. Or two weeks and five days. Or two weeks and four days and nine hours.  So unless Shireen had some reason to think of each week as significant in its distinction from the other weeks, she meant it as a single span of time. And anything less would be “less than three weeks,” not “fewer than three weeks.”

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