I just wrote an e-mail and had to use the word,
it was in this sentence, "you are a lot further along in your studies".....should I have used farther instead?????
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02-05-03, 01:45 PM
Lydia
for the most part, they are typically used interchangeably, but as a rule, farther typically pertains to distance and further for advancement not pertaining to distance.

So - in the case of your email, you used it perfectly!! Smile

03-05-03, 08:11 AM
Pin~Jinx
further is usually used in the sense of 'additional' . You know, like 'moreover'.
It's other meaning is advance, however,it is more like
to advance,
a verb.

Whereas farther means further than! or beyond, or ahead

Sooo......KP, I think you used it correctly.
Pin~Jinx / anarchist

[This message was edited by Pin~Jinx on 03-05-03 at 08:24 AM.]

03-05-03, 10:38 AM
Ewood27
This, which agrees with the answers above, is from the Atomica thesaurus:

USAGE NOTE Since the Middle English period many writers have used farther and further interchangeably. According to a relatively recent rule, however, farther should be reserved for physical distance and further for nonphysical, metaphorical advancement. Thus 74 percent of the Usage Panel prefers farther in the sentence If you are planning to drive any farther than Ukiah, you'd better carry chains, and 64 percent prefers further in the sentence We won't be able to answer these questions until we are further along in our research. In many cases, however, the distinction is not easy to draw. If we speak of a statement that is far from the truth, for example, we should also allow the use of farther in a sentence such as Nothing could be farther from the truth. But Nothing could be further from the truth is so well established as to seem a fixed expression.

03-08-03, 05:41 PM
Tree
Yes....

"Farther" refers to distance
and "further" is in reference
to advancing, as in "furthering
one's education" etc.


03-28-03, 09:53 PM
cattywampus
But what about "furthermore?" What kind of advancement does that refer to?

Here's a couple more: More and less and fewer: People constantly say "More than a hundred," which is ok, I guess, but "less than a hundred" ought to be "fewer than a hundred," it seems to me. More and less ought to refer to mass, and fewer to numbers. Does anyone know the rule for this?

This type thing is meant to confabulate you. If Rumsfeld says "fewer than 100 casualties," what does he mean? Nothing. It could be 99, or 50 or 3. If you're going to say "more than one hundred," why not say 130, or 199 or whatever it is?

Catty (who has been troubled by this since 2nd grade) Confused

03-29-03, 01:44 PM
Monsterquizzer
Re 'less' and 'fewer' in British usage...miles, minutes and pounds (dollars, if you like) are all countable nouns. However, no-one would dream of saying: "My workplace is fewer than two miles from home, so it takes a taxi fewer than ten minutes to get there and the driver charges fewer than four pounds." There simply are situations which demand the informal ‘less' rather than the supposedly grammatically-correct ‘fewer'. As time passes, we'll see much more of ‘less' and much less of ‘fewer', I suspect. As an old-timer, I still differentiate between them, but I don't complain about people who choose not to... or don't know that they ‘should'.
It must be remembered, however, that there is a considerable difference - in terms of meaning - between a teacher telling his class: a) "Write fewer funny compositions" as opposed to: b) "Write less funny compositions." The first would mean they'd been writing too many of these and should try to cut the quantity down and the second would mean the pupils were welcome to go on writing them, but the compositions should not be quite as amusing!

03-29-03, 05:30 PM
maiku
MQ: Your observations about less than as opposed to fewer than occurring before measure phrases like ten miles, five minutes, and so on, is accurate, and would hold for all varieties of standard English, I'm sure.

But this is not because there is some exceptional preference for a less formal usage in these cases: the usage is in fact entirely regular before a whole class of such measure terms, or quantitative terms, including not only distance, time, and sums of money, but quantities of energy, weight, area, volume, and even speed. Thus, we also have "less than 50 watts, 100 ergs, 30 tons, 150 acres, 6 gallons, and 75 mph. The regularity here is that all of these plural noun phrases represent a quantity, and in every case the expression "less than Q" is to be construed as "less than (a quantity of ) Q," e.g., "less than (a quantity of) ten miles."

Note that there is no sense in which a distance of any sort, whether of 10 miles or 10 inches, could be counted. So the regularity that the determiner fewer occurs with count nouns while less occurs with mass nouns holds true after all, though somewhat covertly.

[This message was edited by maiku on 03-29-03 at 05:47 PM.]

03-29-03, 08:01 PM
cattywampus
Maiku, I do admire your erudition.

Catty Smile

03-29-03, 08:18 PM
maiku
And please, don't all of you pile on by "refuting" my assertion above with citations of things like "I'm counting the miles before Engine Number Nine brings me back home to you."

In this case, and in many similar ones, what is being counted is the number of miles, not the miles themselves qua distance. This can be measured, but not counted, and the units we choose to measure it in yield different numbers for the same thing.

The English word money, though, is indeed quite exceptional. You'd think that money was a pre-eminently countable thing (indeed, it may be truly said that there are those who do little else but count money). Nevertheless, money is a mass noun in English, and grammatically speaking, measurable but not countable.

This curious state of affairs harkens back to the time when money was, in fact, weighed rather than counted. The English monetary unit pound also reflects this earlier usage.

I realize we're getting farther and farther away from kittypal's original question here (or is it further and further?). Well, that's not my fault. It's your fault, catty. Furthermore (which is the correct form, not *farthermore), I don't care. The grammar of count nouns vs. mass nouns is intrinsically a far more interesting topic. Smile

03-29-03, 09:32 PM
cattywampus
I didn't say "farthermore." Who did?

Catty

This message has been edited. Last edited by: DorianGreyed,