Stannis is Right

In my opinion, Stannis Baratheon is one of the best characters on Game of Thrones. Respected, if not loved, by followers and rivals alike, Stannis is a paragon of clenched-jaw determination, a man truly convinced of his claim to the throne. Unlike the boorish Robert, the insufferably glib Renly, and the psychotic Joffrey, Stannis actually has the qualities needed to be a strong and fair leader of a deeply divided land. Unyielding attention to detail and unshakeable belief in his convictions make Stannis Baratheon a Westerosi force of nature. He comes so close to taking King’s Landing, a feat to rival his fighting off the siege of Storm’s End during Robert’s successful rebellion. Only after succumbing to the Bannonesque influence of the Red Woman does he lose his moral compass and, ultimately, his life at the hands of Brienne of Tarth, another favourite of mine.

In addition to his astute military skills and stoic siege-breaking qualities, there is another underappreciated side to Stannis: his impeccable grammar. Witness a famous scene from the underrated fifth season in which Stannis attends a meeting at Castle Black. During the meeting, one minor character triumphantly claims that there will be ‘less enemies for us.’ As the assembled crowd cheers, Stannis mutters ‘fewer’ under his breath (a call-back to the second season, when he admonishes Davos of Seaworth for saying ‘less fingers’). Stannis’ quickfire quantifier quibbles are now enshrined in GOT meme-lore.

Much like the rightful heir to the Baratheon dynasty, I am also prone to such linguistic nitpicking. For what it is worth, I attribute this to the eagle-eyed attention of my teacher mother, for whom no infinitive should ever be split, and to whom I owe a great debt for instilling in me at an early age the importance of proper grammar. Therefore, in the spirit of Stannis and as an ode to my mum (who will definitely be proofreading this before publication), I would like to highlight a few common errors that (syn)tax my patience.

Let’s start with ‘fewer’ versus ‘less’. We use ‘fewer’ when making a quantifier comparison involving countable nouns, such as ‘enemies’ or ‘fingers.’ ‘Less’ is used when discussing uncountable nouns, such as ‘time’. As the name suggests, a countable noun can indeed be counted. We can count cars, pencils, people, and chairs. An uncountable noun, on the other hand, is often something abstract, like love, or something that would be impossible to count, like water (of course we can count the litres of water, but not the water itself). With this in mind, it is easy to understand Stannis’ irritation with the phrase ‘less enemies.’

Fewer + countable noun -> I have fewer friends (we can count friends)

Less + uncountable noun -> I have less time (we cannot count time, although we can count seconds, minutes, and hours)

Here is a nice, simple sentence that uses both quantifiers: I have fewer friends because I have less time to socialize.

We can see a similar problem in the use of ‘amount’ and ‘number’. I was recently watching an otherwise excellent video online about Search Engine Optimization and was shocked to hear the presenter say, ‘We can conduct the most amount of searches.’ Surely, I am not the only one whose eyes hurt reading that! To fix it, keep the following in mind:

Number + of + countable noun -> We can conduct a number of searches

Amount + of + uncountable noun -> We have a certain amount of money

A better sentence would be: We can conduct the highest number of searches.

At this point, it is not hard to imagine my readership shrinking given the somewhat fussy nature of this post. After all, does it really matter if we confuse these words? Is meaning really being lost? Perhaps not, but I have to think that there are others out there like me, participle partisans and preposition pedants, who simply cannot stand for such grammar gaffes. Therefore, you should embrace your inner-Stannis and pay attention to countable and uncountable nouns and the words that we use to quantify them. Otherwise, to mangle Melisandre’s mantra, your writing could be dark and full of errors….