“Less-Than”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jennifer calling from Baltimore. How are you?

Hi, Jennifer. I’m doing well. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’m a tutor of adult learners of English as a second language. So what I do with them is I read articles with them and we discuss our comprehension.

And recently a term came up that I had some trouble explaining to one of my students. And the term is less than as a way of describing someone’s status or worth. And it’s just less than without any following adjective or noun.

So it’s not saying that this person is less than someone else or they’re less than awesome, but it’s just simply less than. I actually have the sentence here from the article if you’d like to hear it.

Yes, please.

Well, first of all, I’ll give you a bit of a background. The article has to do with how much attention women should give to dressing fashionably at work. And the sentence goes, you can’t just neglect your looks, because that will be held against you.

On the other hand, to be a fashionable woman, like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, means taking the chance that you’re going to be dismissed as less than. Dismissed as less than. You understand the meaning, right?

Yes. So I take the meaning to be that they have kind of a lower value in the office place than men in the context of this article. And it’s just one of those things where I always want to complete the sentence and say, well, you’re feeling less than what exactly?

One of my favorite things to do when I come across something new like this is go straight to Twitter and search. It’s the greatest database of casual speech that I know of right now. And I can come up with a ton. I’m looking here. I’ve got a ton of uses of this over the last few years. And they’re all really consistent with this.

And what I love about them is that the further back I go, and I bet this holds true in news articles and journal articles, the more likely less than in this particular case is going to appear inside quotation marks. And this demonstrates to me that relatively recently this started being used, and people are marking this particular odd usage of less than as somehow different from the normal use of less than.

So there’s one example, treating human beings as, quote, less than, unquote, because of who they are is in fact a hateful action. This is from a tweet. And it’s really interesting to me because when we see this as linguists or when I see it as a lexicographer, we know, aha, this word is transforming or this phrase is transforming.

So you’ve caught something here that is currently in the process of forming, where less than doesn’t in some cases require the comparison because what comes after is understood. So many of these uses are about the way men treat women. And so in almost all cases, it’s about less than a man or less than equal.

So there’s a kind of understood less than any kind of less than. So they don’t specify the kind of less than because they’re meaning less than in any way that you can imagine. And are you two seeing it hyphenated? Is that how you saw it, Jennifer?

Yes, yes, it is hyphenated.

Oh, I’ve seen it hyphenated in a couple, but many of them are not hyphenated. I find it really interesting that you say that this is coming up recently, that it’s something that’s in the process of being developed, because I myself have only noticed this phrase in the past few years.

Yeah, every word that we know was new to us once, so don’t be surprised at that. What I want to know is, how did you explain this? Have you tried it yet? Did you give it a shot?

When I tried to explain it, I simply said that the person described in this article is feeling inadequate. So that less than would be a way of saying inadequate.

Yeah, that’s a good synonym for it. Okay. Yeah, less than equal. There’s almost an unspoken equal in there, right? Less than equal. But you’ve got a good ear. I imagine that being in the trenches, teaching people who don’t speak English as a second language brings a lot of your own English kind of to the fore. You’re like, whoa, I don’t know why I say this thing I always say.

It certainly does, yeah. Yeah, there’s a great Latin proverb that goes, qui dosit discit, which is, he who teaches learns, or in your case, she. It’s a great quote.

Thank you very much for calling, Jennifer. I hope we’ve helped, all right?

Oh, yes, you’ve helped a lot, and it was a pleasure.

All right, take care. Now, good luck with your teaching.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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