Teeth

There’s an important difference between less and fewer. Of course, when I say “important”, I mean “important to me”, but it’s one of those little things that I like to get right. “Less” is used when there aren’t any numbers involved, “fewer” when there are. So, for instance, there are fewer days left in 2008 than there were last week, but less time.

This distinction is important, because I’m reflecting on the fact that I have less teeth in my mouth than I did a week ago, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I had fewer teeth. I still have just as many teeth as I had earlier in December, but one of them in particular is a lot smaller than it used to be because first the outside bit of tooth came away from the ancient filling, and then on Saturday the filling, complete with small protruding screw, came out as well, leaving me with a little jagged bit of tooth sticking down from my gum. Hence me being in a situation where I have the same amount of teeth, but less total tooth.

Unfortunately this is not the only bit of tooth to have parted company with my jaws; I’ve had several come detached since the summer. And what’s more, I was warned that this very thing would happen. A couple of years ago, when I last went to the dentist, he told me that unless I had work done, then my back teeth would fall apart. He then told me that I would have to pay £1500 for the initial work, with the result that (a) I didn’t even try to find out how much it would cost in total and (b) I didn’t go back again. Well, he was right, but on the other hand we all had a very nice holiday last year. We’ve since discovered that as dentists go, he was a very expensive one, but nonetheless there’s no way that I can go to any dentist now without needing to take out a loan.

So far, the small remaining fragment of tooth doesn’t hurt (unlike the broken bit on the other side of my mouth, but that only hurts sometimes when I bite down hard with it and so doesn’t really constitute a problem), which means that I can put off doing anything about it for a while. I assume that it (or the other broken teeth) will probably cause problems at some point, and that I’ll have to have it pulled out – assuming that that’s the cheapest option – but until then, I’ll just have to content myself with knowing that while having less money than I’d like means fewer options for personal healthcare, at least it’s grammatically correct.