Poor less!
It’s getting less and less respect. Or I suppose, to be up to date, I should say fewer and fewer respect.
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Poor less!
It’s getting less and less respect. Or I suppose, to be up to date, I should say fewer and fewer respect.
Who, me?
Yes, less is joining the company of who and me in disrespect.
Remember when signs at checkout lines at grocery stores used to say “10 items or less”? Thanks to the efforts of language vigilantes like the late and truly great William Safire, a store that has pretensions of being upscale now announces “10 items or fewer.”
On the other hand, not to scare away ordinary customers, at Walmart you can still see “20 items or less.” (Red herring: 20 items vs. 10. Let’s keep to the point here.)
What’s the matter with less? The experts will be glad to tell you. For example, Scholastic’s “Parent Primer on Grammar” explains:
Did you know that sign in the supermarket that says, “10 items or less” is grammatically incorrect? It is! It should read, “10 items or fewer” and here’s why:
Fewer is used when describing countable things. Less is used when describing more abstract amounts—amounts that can’t be measured exactly but can be compared.
As in so many instances, the grammatical situation is more complicated than this. Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage, the authority in such matters, takes three columns of fine print to demonstrate that less has been used for “countable things” too, going back a thousand years before the invention of supermarkets.
I’m tempted to argue: If it’s so important to distinguish between less and fewer, why don’t we have two different words to distinguish between the two kinds of more?
But I’ll resist the temptation. After all, language is conventional, not logical. Instead, let me direct your attention to the turning point, the first advocacy of fewer over less. MWCDEU finds it in Robert Baker’s Reflections on the English Language (London, 1770): “This Word [less] is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think fewer would do better. No Fewer than a Hundred appears to me not only more elegant than No less than a Hundred, but more strictly proper.”
That’s the difference. Baker’s successors have continued to flog less for over two centuries. No wonder that fewer now seems more elegant and proper.
Not one in a thousand English speakers has the grammatical expertise to pinpoint the distinction between fewer and less. But many are aware that somehow, fewer is better. Hence the temptation to display one’s elegance and propriety on all occasions, even where less still looks more normal:
One fewer minute to wait.
It cost me a little fewer than 68 dollars and 23 cents.
I’m thinking fewer and fewer of you.
In elegance, fewer has joined the company of whom:
May I ask whom is calling?
Whom are you, anyway?
And likewise the elegant I, he, she:
Woe is I!
. . . the ability of you and I to talk with each other
If you’re interested, you can find plenty of language vigilantes who will explain when you really should use fewer, whom, and I, but that’s not my concern here. Instead, it’s a practical one:
What’s a body to do between the Scylla of nitpicking grammarians and the Charybdis of pretentious laypeople?
Punt!
