Samantha Bennett

Supermarket express check-outs used to have limits of “12 items” (or 10 or 8 or whatever) “or less.” It took grammar advocates years to persuade markets to change the signs to read “12 items or fewer,” which is correct. But many, many people still admit that they can’t keep less and fewer straight and don’t understand what the difference between them is.

They’re both obviously the opposite of more. Why are there two different words, and why aren’t they really interchangeable?

You can have more pie, or more cars. But while you can have less pie, you can only have fewer cars. Why? The answer is actually simple. If you can count it, you use fewer. If you can’t count it, you use less. So, as you can count cars, you would say this highway is now being used by fewer cars. But what about traffic? Traffic isn’t countable; you can’t have 10,000 traffic. You can have 10,000 cars. So fewer cars use this highway, but there is less traffic. Similarly with pie: You may eat less pie, but you would eat fewer pieces, because you can count pieces. (Or you can count pies: There are fewer pieces of pie, or fewer pies, but pie, as a substance, is not countable, and so you eat less.)

If you ever watched any of the “Next Generation” incarnation of the Star Trek franchise, you may remember that Data was an amazingly sophisticated  android who was always yearning to feel human emotions. Occasionally, he would be put in a situation where he would try really hard to tell jokes, be a parent, or have a girlfriend, and his struggles to understand the motions he was going through–and then interpret the reactions of actual humans–were by turns funny, interesting, and touching.

Well, AI isn’t quite there yet, you may be relieved (or disappointed) to discover. Research scientist Janelle Shane has a neural network and is doing what anyone would do with a neural network: encouraging it to generate superhero names and pickup lines.

The superhero names are wildly entertaining. Who wouldn’t want to see a Justice League made up of Mister Man, Sapgirl, and Red Fart? Supperman must have the power to revitalize leftovers, Superbore humanely puts his opponents to sleep, and Green Hooter II … must have an origin story that explains what happened to Green Hooter I. I think I’m most curious, though, about the superhero named Nana. I imagine her weapons are knitting needles and her superpower is disapproval.

The pickup lines are a more complicated assignment, though, and the results demonstrate how complicated English grammar is (some sound like the efforts of a nonnative learner or poor translator), and how delicate the task of using idiom and figurative language can be.

After a great deal of hard work programming in a vast library of real human pickup lines (“much more painful than I had expected,” and I hear that), Shane sat back and let the neural net come up with its own. Some are just nonsensical, but some are weirdly endearing:

Are you a candle? Because you’re so hot of the looks with you.

And my favorite, which I may have to use someday:

You look like a thing and I love you.

It’s going to be a long time before robots put writers, poets, comedians, or lounge lizards out of work.

Using good (or at least audience-appropriate) grammar is a way of showing a baseline level of respect for the person or people you’re addressing. This is especially important in formal communications where you don’t know your audience personally, such as most business correspondence, including email, and early-stage online dating overtures. You wouldn’t post, in a public place, a picture of yourself in a ratty bathrobe, with spinach in your teeth and free-range hair. Even your friends don’t really want to see you that way.

Written communication has the same standards, or should. Just as you “proofread” your appearance before you go out in the world where people can see you–a quick look in the mirror to ensure that hair, face, teeth, clothes all reach a basic level of hygiene and maintenance–you shouldn’t release anything you’ve written into the world without reading it over, in its entirety, just to make sure you haven’t made some glaringly obvious gaffe. Especially online, where autocorrect is not always on your side.

A genuine mistake is embarrassing enough–when you’ve typed “Wednesday, May 17th” when May 17th turns out to be a Thursday–but realizing you’ve just invited your date to a concert on “Wendesday, May 17rd,” when you know perfectly well how to make that right, is a whole other level of ouch. Even worse is knowing that your date now either thinks you’re an idiot or knows that you couldn’t be bothered to take 0.08 seconds to read over your message before sending it. What does that carelessness say about you, and about how much respect you have for your date?

So always, always proofread. It takes hardly any time at all. You may not prevent every mistake, but the ones you catch will make the extra seconds or minutes sooooooo worthwhile.