I have some old notebooks that contain equations in my own writing which I can’t read. This isn’t surprising–I haven’t kept up with my math, and I’ve forgotten lots of stuff. If I took a course, I’d probably relearn how to read those equations.
It’s a little more worrisome to be unable to read things I’ve written only a few months ago. I was looking through my notes of potential subjects, and I found at least one I couldn’t construe for a minute.
To be fair, it’s a fairly cryptic note. “When less, when fewer”, it says. At first, all that came to mind was a song from Sesame Street, in which a man keeps offering a woman more and more gifts, while she’s protesting that she doesn’t need all that stuff.
But after a few moments, I remembered: It was a grammatical question: I’d been noticing that more and more people seemed to be having difficulty properly using the terms ‘less’ and ‘fewer’.
The rule’s pretty simple: ‘fewer’ is used for countable things, ‘less’ for things that can’t be counted. Thus one wishes for less water in a flood, but fewer icebergs in the sealanes. Unless there are a lot of icebergs, of course: too many to count.
But too many people seem to’ve missed that rule, and they use the terms interchangeably, or just backward. So I wrote a note to remind people, or to tell them for the first time, in case they’d never heard it before. And the reason I couldn’t read my own note was that I was no longer in the frame of mind I was in when I wrote the note. But it came back to me. It might have come back faster, if the note hadn’t been so cryptic. Just a reminder: to myself as much as to anyone else.
For today’s question that’s harder to research: we’ve most of us had the experience of not being able to see something that’s ‘right under (our) nose’. I began to wonder why. So I tried looking at my nose. It’s not out of the range of vision (not mine, anyway). But it’s not possible to focus on it, in my experience. There’s not so much a blind spot. Most people’s noses are not so large as to block the view entirely. It’s more of a learned blocking out of information. I can’t see the nose: or anything under it. It’s probably a sort of mild visual agnosia, and it probably develops fairly early in life, to keep us from being distracted by the (generally unchanging) nose. And that may help explain why, when I turn my head just a little, the formerly ‘invisible’ (more undetectable, really) thing suddenly appears, as if it had materialized from nowhere.
treraia 