I am not an expert, but I’ve been arguing with a coworker about this for to much time… to many hours have been wasted.
In my opinion, it’s all about the quantifier. If something has a known or implied quantifier, you can use many. If the quantifier is vague, you should use much>
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>>Some examples:
I have too much cheese. (quantifier could be slices, pounds, ounces, whatever)
I have too many slices of cheese. (quantifier is slices)
I drank too much coffee. (quantifier could be ounces, cups, gallons, whatever)
I drank too many ounces of coffee. (quantifier is ounces)
I have too much clothes. (quantifier could be articles, pounds, sq ft, whatever)
I have too many articles of clothing.
There question in my mind, is this: is the quantifier for clothes implied? And if so what is it? …Articles? If you say it is articles; then does a sock count as one article, and a shirt as another? Try to count the quantity of clothes that you have and I think you will run into a number of questions.> >
I think that the rule should be this:> >
If you can put a number in front of the collection in a sentence, then you can use many, otherwise you should use much
I have N apples. That is too many.
I have N fruit. WRONG… So I have too much fruit. Not to many
I cannot have N clothes, but I can have a lot of clothes. So I choose to use much.