“Too many” kinda sounds right to my ear because beans is plural, but the second logically seems right because its served by volume and is not ‘countable’ as ordinary (non-destroyed) beans might be.

  • robolemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    21 days ago

    When it comes to refried beans, “too many” or “too much” are both incorrect. The correct construction is “may I have some more please?”

      • neidu2@feddit.nl
        1·
        20 days ago

        Señor*

        Also, I’d love to see a version of Oliver Twist where the orphanage exclusively serves tex-mex for some reason.

        19th century london orphan taste buds who are used to the blandest of the blandest slop only get to eat really spicy food at the orphanage for the added cruelty.

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
    41·
    21 days ago

    Since the word “beans” is plural, and countable, it’s “many”.

    “Many” is for things that are countable, “much” is for things that aren’t. e.g. Water - you’d say “too much water” but you wouldn’t say “too much cups of water” but “too many cups of water”.

    Though “refried beans” is a thing on its own, I could go either way. Like if you were spooning beans onto my plate, I may say “too much!”.

    How’s that for a confident, clear answer? 😆

  • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
    1·
    21 days ago

    You would use too much, since refried beans is an uncountable noun. You have to add a unit to it to make it countable.

    You would say “there’s too much refried beans on my plate, and too many cans of refried beans in the pantry.”

    By adding “cans” to the noun phrase, you’ve made the refried beans countable, you may now use “too many.”

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
      4·
      21 days ago

      I would think that would be “too much” because all the potatoes don’t matter at that point, it’s one entity. There are no more individual potatoes, we are Borg mashed potatoes!

  • Womble@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    21 days ago

    Whichever sounds more natural to you, because the whole countable/non-countable less/fewer is crap made up by Edwardian snobs and then repeated by school teacher gammarians too into being “proper”. To quote wiki

    The comparative less is used with both countable and uncountable nouns in some informal discourse environments and in most dialects of English.[citation needed] In other informal discourse however, the use of fewer could be considered natural. Many supermarket checkout line signs, for instance, will read “10 items or less”; others, however, will use fewer in an attempt to conform to prescriptive grammar. Descriptive grammarians consider this to be a case of hypercorrection as explained in Pocket Fowler’s Modern English Usage.[7][8] A British supermarket chain replaced its “10 items or less” notices at checkouts with “up to 10 items” to avoid the issue.[9][10] It has also been noted that it is less common to favour “At fewest ten items” over “At least ten items” – a potential inconsistency in the “rule”,[11] and a study of online usage seems to suggest that the distinction may, in fact, be semantic rather than grammatical.[8] Likewise, it would be very unusual to hear the unidiomatic “I have seen that film at fewest ten times.”[12][failed verification]

    The Cambridge Guide to English Usage notes that the “pressure to substitute fewer for less seems to have developed out of all proportion to the ambiguity it may provide in noun phrases like less promising results”. It describes conformance with this pressure as a shibboleth and the choice “between the more formal fewer and the more spontaneous less” as a stylistic choice.[13]

    • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
      0·
      21 days ago

      Well no one way is correct and one way is not, regardless of what this particularly shitty Wikipedia article says.

      The comparative less is used with both countable and uncountable nouns in some informal discourse environments and in most dialects of English.[citation needed] In other informal discourse however, the use of fewer could be considered natural.

      “in some informal discourse environments?” Does that mean environments in which writing goes unedited and mistakes don’t matter?

      Just because some people somewhere do a thing doesn’t mean it’s right. To people with formal writing experience, or people that are just well read, the agreement errors are obvious and revealing.

      This is a question of diction not style. Check the dictionary. Less and fewer have different meanings. One of them affirmatively describes something uncountable.