When I was an ESL teacher I loved teaching those rules of grammar that had logical explanations – like countables and uncountables. You can’t count money, I would tell my students, but you can count dollars, so you say “I don’t have much money” or “I don’t have many dollars.” The same with water and, for example, puddles. “Last week there was too much water in our neighborhood.” “Last week there were too many puddles in our neighborhood.” It would never occur to a native speaker to say “too much puddles.”
Or would it? Yesterday I read the opening paragraph on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. The reviewer, a distinguished author, wrote: “The waves come at us. We are now being hit with the third wave of case numbers in the Covid-19 tsunami and the first wave of books about it. There will be more, much more, of both.”
“MANY MORE!!!!” I shouted from my armchair. Then I thought of all the hours I had spent drilling the countables and uncountables rule into students who, if somehow they read this paragraph, would wonder what I had been teaching them.
