EDIT: you guys have dug up some truly horrible pisstakes :D Thank you for those.
To the serious folk - relax a little. This is Mildly Infuriating, not I'm dying if this doesn't stop. As a non-native speaker I was taught a certain way to use the language. The rules were not written down by me, nor the teachers - it was done by the native folk. Peace!
Yeah the inconsistencies are interesting.
Is it because of the “than”? Do we just not like saying “fewer than”? Because it wouldn’t offend my ear to hear “we need less than 5 chairs”, but “we need less chairs” is outrageous to me, (for less than however many chairs it takes for them to become dequantized) [I did it again there, did you notice?]
Or maybe it’s to do with the minutes being a quantization of something continuous, whereas usually we deal with the transition the other way.
“couches vs. furniture” couches are discrete, furniture is discrete things as a collective.
“time vs minutes” time is continuous, minutes are a quantization of it. That is a difference compared to couches/ furniture. How do we talk about other quantizations of continuous?
Distance: how far is it? Less than 5 miles. Maybe it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that we talk about miles but inherently understand that distance isn’t countable.
Oops that used “than” again. Uhhh… “the battery in my electric car is degraded so I get 10 less miles per charge”. Hmm I’m not sure if that sounds right…
It might have to do with grouping. Use less for one lump, use fewer for individual count.
I think this is correct.
Suppose she has a 4-gallon bucket, 3/4 filled. She has “less than 4 gallons.”
Contrast with a milk crate, which normally holds 4 jugs of milk, but it, too is only 3/4 filled. Same liquid volume of milk but now I would say that she has “fewer than 4 gallons”, because the milk now comes in discrete units.