For example, let's take the following sentence:
It wasn't a bad crash and little damage was done to my car.
It's a question from Cambridge test. I made a mistake here; I put "small damage." My guess is as follows: we should probably use "little" and not "small" because 'damage' is an uncountable noun. I did not realize it at first. But it's only an assumption. Am I right? And can we somehow substitute the adjective "little", e. g. can we say "slight damage"?
Best Answer
Yes, this is the common, uncountable, abstract sense of "damage". Since there is nothing that we can count, there is nothing to which we can assign individual sizes. There are no individuals to size. The large/small distinction simply doesn't make sense here.
Other distinctions do make sense. The much/little distinction represents degree in the same manner that large/small represents size. Severity can be represented by pairs like minor/major and gradations like slight/moderate/severe. There are, of course, many other polarities and spectra that make sense with uncountable abstracts, as do many absolute attributes.
Like any language, English has quirks. One of those quirks is the word "little". It has several senses. For example:
We don't want to dismiss the word "little" simply because we've dismissed scales of size and portion.