On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 8:51 PM Edward Murphy via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > > "Without objection" and "without objections" both sound okay to me. I > > prefer the first, but I don't know why. Maybe I'm just used to it. > > The second makes it sound like there need to be objection/s/, plural, to > block the relevant action.
I'd interpret it as only requiring one objection, myself. But "without objections" would be short for "without any objections", logically equivalent to "with 0 objections", but different from "without 0 objections". So it wouldn't be a matter of N defaulting to 0. Indeed, "any" effectively means "1 or more", and the "or more" is implied, so we're left with "without 1 objection". In any case, "without objection" is actually a stock phrase from parliamentary procedure. "Without objections" is also used sometimes, but not as often: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=without+objection%2Cwithout+objections&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1500&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cwithout%20objection%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bwithout%20objection%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bwithout%20Objection%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BWithout%20objection%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cwithout%20objections%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bwithout%20objections%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BWithout%20objections%3B%2Cc0
